A dummy’s guide to email tracking – iTrackMail - Email Tracking Review

I knocked off a star because the “share” feature (with short link) does not work anymore. Otherwise, everything else in app works great, even the free version. It shows more details then similar products, such as full user agent (iPad version only) or geographic description of the source IP (and yes, it shows the IP address too). That last bit saves you a manual Whois lookup of the source IP just to figure out where in the world the user is. Why does it show California when you know the user is in another state? Because the user that “opened” your email is using Gmail or similar webmail or custom mail client/app, and those mail servers (in California) process the embedded images then serve them to the user. It’s why some people don’t like Gmail and other web-based email since it is difficult to turn off web beacons, canaries, web bugs, whatever you want to call marketing tracking techniques. Fun fact: Gmail triggers embedded trackers when you load your inbox, even before you open the specific message. So marketing (and spammers) know the recipient email is legit. If the recipient opens the email in the iOS native mail client and they allow loading of embedded images (off by default on my iPhone...maybe that was a custom setting I chose) then it will trigger the web beacon placed by iTrackMail, and you will see the person’s actual IP address (i.e. their ISP router eternal interface).
Review by Arduous on iTrackMail - Email Tracking.