EmailOracle (YC W10) Tracks Your Emails and Confirms They've Been Opened

Gonna have a pretty high false negative rate though, right? Virtually all modern email programs and webmail systems block images by default (unless the sender has been marked as "safe" or sometimes if they've been added to your address book).<p>You might as well steal some of the (very clever) tricks used here: <a href="http://litmus.com/email-analytics" rel="nofollow">http://litmus.com/email-analytics</a> to track whether the messages was forwarded and the time spent reading. They don't work all the time, but it's a pretty neat piece of code.

I usually consider emails with some kind of read-receipt requests or (even worse) tracking images (which fortunately gets blocked in any decent email client) at least very rude.

Somebody please write a blocker for this. Do we need something special, or can we just add some rules to AdBlock Plus to work around these antisocials?<p>Good job funding this garbage, PG.

If anyone wanted to burn their relationship with me, spying on what most would consider to be unwatched activity, involving something as specific and interpersonal as email, would be a pretty good way.<p>It's just... creepy.<p>If you have a legal need to make sure I've received something, use registered post.

Don't most email clients (both web and desktop based) block images loading by default to specifically stop this kind of tracking ?<p>I recall spammers using precisely this technique with early html supporting email clients in the late '90s to validate email accounts.

As others have pointed out, Gmail and other mail clients are designed to specifically block this kind of thing.<p>How is an apparently viable business based on such a non-platform?

Reading this was very surprising for me, because I'd always assumed this kind of thing was impossible.<p>After going over the comments here, there is apparently a (well known) trick of adding images to email, then tracking hits for that image on your server, thus giving you "email analytics". Apparently this is one of the reasons that most email programs block images by default. In fact, I've long wondered <i>why</i> images are blocked by default, and only now found out.<p>Always amazes me how many things I have yet to learn!

What a terrible name for the company. When I first read the title I thought "Email Oracle? Why would would I do that?". Not to mention Oracle will probably make claims to it.

All I see when I read about this tool is the forthcoming lawsuit from Oracle.

As a diehard mutt user, I wish them the best of luck.

Seems almost identical to this company (from a previous YC round, I think):<p><a href="https://etacts.com/" rel="nofollow">https://etacts.com/</a><p>I really like the idea of an "expect followup with in N days" feature for GMail. It's interesting that GMail's dominance as a client for heavy email users has accidentally enabled a market of add-ons delivered as browser extensions.

It appears that one of the features this site offers is the ability to find e-mails you've sent that need followup because they haven't been responded to. I'd love to have that feature built into Gmail (and it seems like something very doable). Does anyone have a search/filter setup that allows you to find these "need to followup" e-mails?

A visually attractive site and sounds like a great plugin!<p>But quickly looking through the site...who are you? DNS records show private whois...GoDaddy's Domain By Proxy service. I'm logging in by giving my Gmail or GoogleApp credentials but is this through OpenID? Is there a terms of service before I do this? If you were a known entity I'm sure I would be quite a bit more forgiving.<p>Also, I saw a previous comment here by Tim about no visible pricing info by Tim...why should I have to login just to see what is required for an upgrade?<p>I'm interested but too many reasons for hesitation has me clicking away...

I'd rather have a "successful delivery response". It's enough to know that the email was delivered to a device you are responsible for. Tracking who's opening it and when seems a little creepy, also you'll have false positives if the email is blind forwarded.<p>Having worked with attorney's. "I didn't get the email" is common. I'd like just to have a list of the response codes from their server to prove that they accepted delivery.

The website mentions nothing of pricing. That's a little off-putting because it either suggests to me there is a hidden charge or they are doing something nefarious with access to my email account (like reading my email to send me targeted spam or something like that).

Forwarded this to our network guys for blocking at the source, cheers.

I recall a similar service a few years back which went a step further and encoded the text into an image, which allowed the sender to revoke the entire message at a later time.<p>Google is not finding anything; maybe it's gone now.

wow, well at least you know who your customers are NOT. don't let it discourage you.<p>i, for one, am looking forward to incorporating this into my workflow.

This could be really useful for e-commerce apps that deliver critical information via email, e.g., product keys or download links.

That service working without the recipient changing his settings is by definition a security hole in the email app.