How to tell if someone read your email (and opened your proposal)

You sent the proposal on Tuesday. It is Friday, and the inbox is quiet. Did they read it and go cold, or has the email been sitting unopened under forty others? Every email client gives a slightly different answer to that question, and none of them a certain one. Here is what each method can tell you, where it breaks, and how to see whether the proposal itself was read, which is usually what you actually want to know.

Can you tell if someone read your email?

Not with certainty. What you can learn is that the message was probably opened. There are three ways to get that signal, and each depends on something outside your control: the recipient agreeing to send a receipt, their mail app loading images, or the recipient clicking a link. "Opened" also covers a two-second glance in the preview pane, so even a reliable open says little about reading.

Read receipts in Gmail and Outlook

A read receipt is a short message the recipient's mail system sends back when your email is opened. It is the only method built into the big email clients, and it has more conditions than most people expect.

Gmail

According to Gmail Help, read receipts are only available to work or school accounts and do not work with personal @gmail.com addresses. Even in Google Workspace you will not get one when you write to a group or alias, when your administrator limits receipts, or when the recipient uses a mail program that does not sync in real time. Google also warns that a receipt does not always mean the message was read: some apps send one when the email is only marked as read.

Outlook

Microsoft lets you request a read receipt and a delivery receipt when you write a message. The recipient can decline to send the read receipt, and there is no way to force it. The feature is not available for IMAP or POP accounts such as Gmail, Yahoo! or iCloud added to Outlook. A delivery receipt only confirms that the message reached the mailbox. If you mostly write from Outlook, our overview of email tracking tools for Outlook covers the add-ins that go further than receipts.

Tracking pixels: how email trackers count opens

Email tracking tools add a tiny invisible image to your message. When the recipient's mail app loads that image from the tool's server, the tool records an open, with the time and often the device. The recipient does not have to agree to anything, which is why most sales email trackers work this way. The open rate in newsletter reports is counted the same way.

The method has three blind spots:

• Images turned off. If the mail app does not load images, no open is recorded, even when the person reads every word.

• Apple Mail Privacy Protection. Apple says the feature prevents senders from seeing whether you opened their message. For recipients who use it, open tracking tells you nothing.

• Opens nobody made. Spam filters, security scanners and link previews can load the image before a person sees the email, so the tracker shows an open while the message is still unread. That is why Sellizer treats an email open as a weak signal and a proposal open as the reliable one.

An opened email is not a read proposal

In sales the email is rarely the point. It carries a proposal, a quote or a contract, and what you need to know is whether that document was read. A read receipt or a pixel says nothing about the attachment: the client may open the email, skim two lines and never open the PDF, or download the PDF and read it on the train with no trace.

A link to the document changes that. The client opens the proposal in the browser, and every visit is recorded by the page the client opens, so nothing depends on an image loading in the email. Apple notes that Mail Privacy Protection does not extend to links, so this works for iPhone readers too. With PDF tracking you see who opened the file, when, and how long they spent on each page. How to turn a PDF into such a link, step by step, is in send a PDF as a tracked link.

What Sellizer shows and what it does not

Sellizer sends the proposal as a link in an email from your own mailbox, or gives you the link to paste into any channel. It keeps two signals apart:

• The envelope next to the proposal status shows whether the email sent through Sellizer was opened. It is an email open, with the limits described above.

• The proposal status changes when the client opens the proposal itself. You get an SMS on the first open and an email on every open, and the statistics show the time spent on each page.

A green envelope next to the status "Sent" means the client opened the email but not the proposal. One limit applies here too: if you allow downloads and the client saves the file, viewing statistics for that copy are no longer available. The open notifications and email open monitoring pages describe both features in detail.

What to do with the signal

An open is only useful if it changes your next step. A simple way to read the combinations:

• No open of any kind after a few days: the email may be buried or filtered. Send a short note, or reach the person on another channel with the same link.

• The email was opened, the proposal was not: they saw your message but did not click. A one-line reminder with the link usually works better than a long follow-up.

• The proposal was opened and the pricing page read for a while: this is the moment to call, while the numbers are still fresh.

• The proposal is opened again days later: someone may be showing it to a colleague. Ask whether anyone else needs answers.

If you would rather not watch for these moments yourself, follow-ups based on how the client reads the proposal send the reminder for you. More on tracking the whole proposal process is on our proposal tracking software page.