[edit]by Dave:
Thread split off from PASSPORT ADVICE:- 0871 NATIONAL RATE!!! due to going off-topic. Thread title amended.[/edit]


derrick wrote on Feb 6^th, 2007 at 10:29am:

No I did not receive a reply, not even from my tag saying the message had been opened, so maybe I cannot take any credit for the removal of the rate claim?

The tag as you call it or Read Receipt is something the person you send the message to can choose to set on their email software not to respond to.

I feel perfectly sure that both your email message and mine were received but in line with their overall shadowy operation based on looking as though they are an official site of the UK Passport Service they prefer not to give email senders the comfort of knowing that their messages have been received.

I am quite sure they removed the claim that 0871 is National Rate fearing that I would follow through on my threat to complain to Ofcom and the ASA about their website.

No my tag is  MSGTAG, and tells me that a recipient of my e-mail has opened it, they cannot change it's status, as soon as the e-mail is opened I receive an e-mail telling me so, it is not the OE read receipt.

I also threatened them with Ofcom ASA and Trading Standards.

derrick wrote on Feb 6^th, 2007 at 11:32am:

No my tag is  MSGTAG, and tells me that a recipient of my e-mail has opened it, they cannot change it's status, as soon as the e-mail is opened I receive an e-mail telling me so, it is not the OE read receipt. I also threatened them with Ofcom ASA and Trading Standards.

Where do I get this MSGTAG product and is it compatible with Microsoft Outlook?  It sounds good as certain large corporate email systems completely ignore email read receipt requests by default, although some other corporate mail systems send you a read receipt every single time the recipient views it (not just the first time) which can be quite illuminating in finding out that your email is still receiving further attention.

If it wasn't reading our emails that did the trick then perhaps it was getting to hear of this thread on this now quite widely monitored website.

Here is their home page, I use it on OE but don't see why it is not compatable with other servers,  http://www.msgtag.com/home/

There is the free option where the tag is always on and the recipient will always see it, then you can purchase an upgrade where you can turn off the facility for the recipient to see it.

derrick wrote on Feb 6^th, 2007 at 11:58am:

Here is their home page, I use it on OE but don't see why it is not compatable with other servers,  http://www.msgtag.com/home/ There is the free option where the tag is always on and the recipient will always see it, then you can purchase an upgrade where you can turn off the facility for the recipient to see it.

Thanks Derrick I will give the free version a try.

Does this product have any competitors?  And is it best of those currently available?

I would assume there are more of a similar ilk out there, but I do not know of them, maybe a Google search would reveal something.

derrick wrote on Feb 6^th, 2007 at 12:15pm:

I would assume there are more of a similar ilk out there, but I do not know of them, maybe a Google search would reveal something.

www.download.com shows that not all feedback about the program is positive and there are suggestions it is a nightmare to uninstall without messing up your email program.

www.download.com/MSGTAG/3640-2369_4-10216429.html?tag=qf_ustars

One comment suggests www.readnotify.com is simpler and works better.

derrick wrote on Feb 6^th, 2007 at 10:29am:

No I did not receive a reply, not even from my tag saying the message had been opened, so maybe I cannot take any credit for the removal of the rate claim?

If they convert all HTML emails to plain text, as many more paranoid and/or old fashioned business email systems do, then you wouldn't get an MSGTAG confirmation message as the providers of the software themselves make clear.

NGMsGhost wrote on Feb 6^th, 2007 at 12:52pm:

derrick wrote on Feb 6th, 2007 at 12:15pm: I would assume there are more of a similar ilk out there, but I do not know of them, maybe a Google search would reveal something. www.download.com shows that not all feedback about the program is positive and there are suggestions it is a nightmare to uninstall without messing up your email program. www.download.com/MSGTAG/3640-2369_4-10216429.html?tag=qf_ustars One comment suggests www.readnotify.com is simpler and works better.

Yes I found out about the uninstall procedure by accident after I had installed it, but as far as I know it is just a matter of setting up your e-mail account again!!  Although you can detag e-mails if you want, it also does not tag multiple e-mails, you need the paid for upgrade for that.
If you go down the route of installing the "readnotify" please let me know how it goes.


NGMsGhost wrote on Feb 6^th, 2007 at 1:19pm:

If they convert all HTML emails to plain text, as many more paranoid and/or old fashioned business email systems do, then you wouldn't get an MSGTAG confirmation message as the providers of the software themselves make clear.

Didn't realise that, I just thought every e-mail was acknowledged

derrick wrote on Feb 6^th, 2007 at 2:23pm:

Yes I found out about the uninstall procedure by accident after I had installed it, but as far as I know it is just a matter of setting up your e-mail account again!!  Although you can detag e-mails if you want, it also does not tag multiple e-mails, you need the paid for upgrade for that. If you go down the route of installing the "readnotify" please let me know how it goes.

I have ruled out using www.readnotify.com as the outgoing emails appear to get routed via their website (all sorts of privacy implications there) and more importantly their website is as slow as a dog and all pages take ages to appear today.

Equally importantly its an annual renewable subscription service and they limit you to only 2,000 outgoing emails a year on even their most expensive service.  This is only just over 5 per day, which is far too low for a paid service.  The claims they make are impressive about what you can tell has happened to your email (a lot more than MSGTAG's top service offers) but only because it has gone via their servers and had all sorts of stuff added to it I would imagine


Quote:

Didn't realise that, I just thought every e-mail was acknowledged

If you go for the top MSGTAG service you can go for the option where people who only support plain text email reading can't open your email at all unless they agree manually to send a confirmation via the website that the message has been received but obviously a lot of people then might just not read your message fearing it is spam or a virus if its not someone that you normally communicate with.

As to uninstalling it does just seem to be a case of replacing the word localhost in your outgoing SMTP server for the email accounts in question with the actual SMTP server of your email provides that was originally there.  Obviously though the program's installer ought to be able to put this back in when it uninstalls as it clearly has this info to send your outgoing email on to once it has reformatted the email to contain MSGTAG website hyperlink.  I suppose they couldn't be bothered as the uninstalling types are generally all ex customers, although it might have helped avoid negative feedback.

I will give the free version a try for a while and see if anyone complains about the visible MSGTAG and website hyperlink in the email or if anyone has any problems reading the email.  It seems this free service along with using Read Receipt when I send to a CC distribution list may be all I need.  Also I may use Read Receipt still for an important message as this gives you a belt and braces approach as many company email systems don't support HTML format emails (necessary for MSGTAG to work) but do support Read Receipt acknowledgement.

I see that Outlook Express does not support Read Receipt requests.  I suppose this may be why you looked for this service in the first place?  I use Microsoft Outlook 2000.

This MSGTAG thingy apparently uses embedded image links. alt.privacy.spytware has more info. It's not going to work for a lot of Outlook users if they set reading options to avoid downloading images. I'd keep the money. There is no guaranteed read/delivery receipt mechanism, or else spammers would be in spam heaven.

NGMsGhost,

OE does support read receipts, I use it when I can remember, however the recipient can click on NO and therefore I do not know if they received it if they don't bother to reply, whereas MSGTAG tells me, as long as they open it, I have had message read via MSGTAG when e-mailing TS  who despite me asking for read receipt will not do so, they tell me they do not have the facility, but the County Council have sent read receipts and I would assume they use the same ISP as the local council.

I use OE 6 and have sent and received read receipts.

derrick wrote on Feb 6^th, 2007 at 3:11pm:

NGMsGhost, OE does support read receipts, I use it when I can remember, however the recipient can click on NO and therefore I do not know if they received it if they don't bother to reply, whereas MSGTAG tells me, as long as they open it, I have had message read via MSGTAG when e-mailing TS  who despite me asking for read receipt will not do so, they tell me they do not have the facility, but the County Council have sent read receipts and I would assume they use the same ISP as the local council.

The only near foolproof way to know that your message has been read is to use the top version of MSGTAG that does not let people open your message, if they are going to read it in plain text, without them manually agreeing to provide a read receipt.  But as previously indicated a lot of people who didn't know you as a sender would think it was a virus or a spammer and so choose not to read the message at all.................

MSGTAG and Read Receipt let you be sure when somebody who wants to co-operate has read the message but you can't be sure that people who don't want to co-operate and use Plain Text email only etc may still have read it anyway, even though you don't know they have.  Still a highly useful tool though to have confirmation of email reading for all those people who do want to play ball.  I'm going to try the free version for a while.


Quote:

I use OE 6 and have sent and received read receipts.

Found it now.  Under the Tools menu instead of under File/Properties as it is in Outlook.

=CM= wrote on Feb 6^th, 2007 at 2:59pm:

This MSGTAG thingy apparently uses embedded image links. alt.privacy.spytware has more info. It's not going to work for a lot of Outlook users if they set reading options to avoid downloading images. I'd keep the money. There is no guaranteed read/delivery receipt mechanism, or else spammers would be in spam heaven.

I had Norton Antispam which used to treat as Spam any messages with embedded links.  I had to turn that feature off as lots of emails I did want to read also had those links as I think most Norton Antispam users would have found.  Norton Antispam still picks up quite a lot though using the sender name and Subject and certain content in the message that is only used by spammers.

I won't open any message with a stupid subject line or with bizarre American names that are obvious spammers.  Unfortunately every now and then by the rule of an infinite number of spam monkeys sending out an infinite number of emails with infinite subjects they manage to use a name and Subject that looks as though it might be genuine so have to open those messages.

I still scan the Norton Antispam folder for sender name and subject though as every now and then a message that isn't spam appears there.  I then click the button to confirm this isn't a Spam message.

When I get an e-mail that I don't like the look of, I right click it > properties > details > message source, this allows me to read the e-mail without opening it from my inbox?! I am assuming by doing this I have not actually opened the e-mail, then I go back to the inbox where the e-mail is still in bold,(i.e. not opened), and just delete it, this in OE not sure if same with Outlook.

derrick wrote on Feb 6^th, 2007 at 3:41pm:

When I get an e-mail that I don't like the look of, I right click it > properties > details > message source, this allows me to read the e-mail without opening it from my inbox?! I am assuming by doing this I have not actually opened the e-mail, then I go back to the inbox where the e-mail is still in bold,(i.e. not opened), and just delete it, this in OE not sure if same with Outlook.

Before I got the latest version of OE I used to do that. OE6 allows you to disable the loading of images in e-mails. Once you have opened such an email, you can then select the option to view the images. This gets round the possibility of it being a spam email that has an image in it that when loaded confirms your email address as being a live one, thus they send you more spam. The MSGTAG service works in the same way. It's also worthwhile remembering that for MSGTAG to work, the recipient must have a live internet connection and that MSGTAG isn't blocked by a firewall.

Webmail from hotmail, yahoo (and I assume google) offers the facility to block images which would also prevent the MSGTAG from working as intended.

Basically, due to the ever increasing rate of spam, services like MSGTAG are becoming redudant due to default settings of NOT displaying images within emails received.

The way to look at it is unless you receive an email saying it was undelivered then the person/company has received the email but it may not always be possible to know when it was read.

bbb_uk wrote on Feb 6^th, 2007 at 6:56pm:

Webmail from hotmail, yahoo (and I assume google) offers the facility to block images which would also prevent the MSGTAG from working as intended. Basically, due to the ever increasing rate of spam, services like MSGTAG are becoming redudant due to default settings of NOT displaying images within emails received. The way to look at it is unless you receive an email saying it was undelivered then the person/company has received the email but it may not always be possible to know when it was read.

These services may well provide the facility not to display images but many users don't enable it because it deprives them of crucial content from legitimate email senders.  Norton Antispam gave me the facility not to display images in emails but I had to turn it off as it was so inconvenient.

Another way to loook at MSGTAG is that its a permanently free service (for the basic service which seems to offer eveyrything you need) and increases the number of confirmed email receipts above using just Read Receipt.  I frequently have to use likely email addresses for senior management in organisations that I am trying to get action from and often the junior customer service staff will not provide me with those email addresses.   Therefore anything which is free and increases the total number of read receipts I get has to be a bonus.

The way I look at it is that if I don't have a read receipt I have no guarantee a message has been read as there are loads of email servers that don't bounce messages for non-existent or closed email accounts.