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I've seen various Chrome or Firefox extensions that allow tracking Gmail messages so that I can know when a recipient views (or clicks on links within) an email.

For example:

  • Yesware
  • getsidekick.com
  • bananatag.com
  • streak.com
  • toutapp.com
  • rocketbolt.com

But, as a software engineer who knows how extensions work and how they reveal my private email data to the maker of the extension (I've seen some really creepy stuff), I really don't want to have any of those installed.

If an open-source project exists (probably coded in javascript), I'd love to tweak it and use that rather than grant access to 3rd party tools.

Thanks!

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  • If the image is hosted externally you could simply put an id on the image and get parameter and wait for the http request but I would assume that you know this with you OS account – William Jul 23 '17 at 22:11
  • I started using the free trial of Banantag without the intrusive browser extension; they allow SMTP relay, which is something I'd never heard of. That seems pretty cool. So now, I'd love to be able to install and run an open-source version of their SMTP relay (which tracks opens and clicks) so that I'm fully in control and haven't given strangers (such as Bananatag) full access to all of my emails. Any ideas? – Ryan Aug 30 '17 at 16:48
  • What are using for sending emails? I could set something but it isn't 2 clicks. – William Aug 30 '17 at 17:11
  • @William I have Gmail accounts, and then I also have Zoho email accounts (which I usually use through Gmail). – Ryan Aug 30 '17 at 19:35
  • I don't really have time to help because I am in school, but you should be able to essentially assign id numbers as $_GET parameters to the image but they would all have to unique for each image and you need a server to do so. Probably need a database at this point. – William Aug 30 '17 at 22:16

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