Service lets senders know recipient has read e-mail

HACKENSACK, N.J. – If Paul Goldstein’s dream comes true, never again will someone be able to use the old “I never got your e-mail” excuse – unless they really didn’t get it.

Goldstein’s company is rolling out a service today that allows e-mail users to confirm their message was read, how long the recipient spent reading it and where, approximately, the recipient read it. In most cases, the person reading the message won’t be any the wiser.

For $50 a year, a person will be able to track as many as 750 messages a month, said Goldstein, an executive at Rampell Software, a tiny company in Cambridge, Mass.

The service may strike e-mail users as an invasion of privacy, especially because they won’t know that the sender is checking up on them.

But Goldstein said it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to verify that their e-mail navigated the many servers, routers and spam filters between someone’s PC and someone else’s in-box. Fred Langa, publisher of a popular technology newsletter, conducted an experiment in November that found 40 percent of regular, non-spam e-mails don’t make it to their intended targets.

America Online subscribers have a similar capability, but only when sending e-mail to other AOL users. Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail program allows senders to confirm that their messages have been delivered.

But to confirm that the message actually has been read, the recipient must be an Outlook user as well and must agree to send the confirmation.

DidTheyReadIt, in contrast, will keep tracking the e-mail even after it is opened. It will show how often someone opened a message, whether that person forwarded it to others and whether those people read it.