I Tried Out the Murky World of Email Tracking

When someone replies to your email four days late, with the classic "sorry just got this", the first impulse is to call bullshit. Who doesn't check their email for four days in an age when your phone gives you 100 screaming notifications every time someone you met on a lads' holiday two years ago posts a meme to What's App group you've never quite got around to muting?

Email tracking makes those excuses redundant. Tracking software basically puts a tiny invisible image in your email which opens automatically. It allows the sender to track the image, when it was opened, and how long it's been between opening the email and the response, providing you with all the information you need to confirm whether the recipient is ignoring you.

Email tracking forms part of a growing movement in workplaces to use technology to monitor employees in dystopian and deeply shifty ways. The appalling regime of fear and perpetual observation at Mike Ashley's budget sportswear fiefdom Sports Direct has come under scrutiny recently, but these kinds of changes are happening everywhere, and not just in low-income jobs - heat and motion sensors were installed (and then quickly withdrawn) at the desks of Telegraph journalists and in the US, there have been a number of cases where companies have tracked employees activities outside of office hours, using the GPS on their company phone. "Privacy in today's workplace", according to the Ellen Bayer of the American Management Institute, "is largely illusory".

Email tracking is one of the most used forms of workplace monitoring and made headlines recently when it was revealed that Louis Van Gaal used email tracking in the last days of his reign of impotence at Manchester United to check whether players were reading the critiques of his matchday performance.

It's actually remarkably easy to hook yourself up with a communication stalking aide. I only had to tap "e-mail tracking software free" into Google and a disturbingly comprehensive array of options popped up in milliseconds. There were ones promising "INSANE COMMERCIAL RESULTS", "Guaranteed Access to that elusive Gatekeeper" and a litany of bullshit about "fostering commercial and strategic partnerships'"

Considering the profound lack of commercial and strategic partnerships in my life, I settled on MailTrack, which A) had a reassuringly bland, distinctly less bugged eyed stalker vibe than its competitors, and B) was free. It didn't promise anything too outlandish, just the simple feature of letting me know exactly when my contact had opened and read my mail. Two reassuring ticks would herald the moment.

My plan was pretty straightforward: I was going to ping a few emails to both personal contacts and impersonal institutions to see if it made a difference to what email trackers describe as the "efficiency of my personal communications" - a handy euphemism for applying stalkerish levels of pressure to mundane daily correspondence.

I began with my girlfriend, because if there's one area of my life where I need constant reassurance that I'm being listened to, it's that.

An honest response and - most importantly - a timely one. According to MailTrack, just five minutes after sending the initial message and three minutes after her seeing it, she replied.

Now, the concept of using my partner as a pawn in my bid to get to grips with communication tracking didn't really feel that great, but I thought it might feel slightly less creepy to see if the software made any effect when dealing with a massive, faceless corporation. And what could be more faceless than a Premier League football club? Taking my inspiration from Van Gaal, I decided to ping a message across to Manchester United. I have a fair amount of impotent, foamy-mouthed rage about the crock of shit season they just had, and feel I deserve compensation for the afternoons I spent watching their turgid games on crap free streams so I figured I'd ask for a refund of sorts. I decided a free museum tour would be an appropriate recompense for those wasted hours.

Despite my appeals and my tracker, it didn't get very far. No response, no acknowledgment and - crucially- no double tick. They didn't even read it.

So I went for a final roll of the dice. I decided to change tactics, slightly. Instead of remonstration, I was going to go for low-level flattery. Talk to a company I truly love: Megabus. I've spent a big meaty whack of my life on the service, with the M11 London-Glasgow a particular favourite. So I thought I'd voice some tempered appreciation for a much maligned British institution in the hope of a response.

I was hoping my tracker would show me how long it takes for Megabus customer service to get back to a lowly customer like myself. But what I wasn't counting on was the automated response. A bog standard, automated, bloodless, reply came back. But according to the tracker my email had never been opened.

Then 10 hours later, MailTrack popped into life, a human being had seen what I'd sent. That was 17:46. They kept the email open until 17:51. Then they opened it again at 18:17 and kept it open for another six minutes…maybe it had been passed on to a superior because at 22:01, it was opened again and it was then I finally got my reply.

Weirdly they then opened the email again the next morning at 9:54. I must have really shaken them up over at Megabus HQ. How many people had my message touched? Maybe Lynda felt like there was more to say. Maybe she wondered whether I'd truly been satisfied. We'll never know.

So, what does the experiment prove? In the case of an individual wildly firing off emails to beleaguered customer service representatives, not an awful lot. Yet with more effort and application, and less in the way of moral qualms and discomfort, email tracking is an insanely useful tool for the hawkish boss, or jealous boyfriend, tracking every correspondence, eagerly awaiting the double tick. Certainly, it does away with the "just got to this" email excuse that has been untouchable for the last 20 years.

For me though, it was just turning me into a crank. It was a relief to deinstall and return to a world of email ignorance. Give me silence over stalking any day.

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