We’ve all heard that line before. Shoot, in a pinch I bet we’ve all used it too.

While many email clients have a variety of ways to confirm a delivery or opening, it usually requires the receiver to click an acknowledgment. Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a more clandestine way to confirm whether or not an email was opened?

Enter SpyPig… (cue James Bond theme song)

Free email tracking is a simple matter of coping and pasting the “Spy Pig” graphic into your outbound e-mail. Once sent, the trap is set. You just sit back and wait for the confirmation email from spypig.com. If your recipient opens the email, you’ll receive a notification along with the open time, views, location, IP address and what application was used. If sending a pig image in an email isn’t quite your style, you can upload the “invisible pig” or upload your own image by signing up for an account. The confirmation email is limited to 10 reports, which doesn’t make it ideal for marketing, but it is a handy business or personal tool.

Visit SpyPig

How to block it: There may be any number of reasons that you may not want someone to know your reading an email. Take this creepy testimonial from spypig.com for instance:

“I had boyfriend once on email and he no reply to email. So i send email and get no reply. But spypig reply to my emails. So now i have new boyfriend; spypig. He always reply. Thank you spypig for make me dump my old boyfriend.” - Rahul, Feb 07, 2010

Since we know how to set the trap, might as well show you how to disarm it too. Since the SpyPig tracking mechanism is html based, you can choose to open emails in the plain-text or rich-text format. This will disable the tracking ability of SpyPig so you can peruse the questionable email safely. The trick is to know who might send an email with a nefarious intent. If you’re using Microsoft Outlook, you can also view the email inside the viewing pane instead of opening the email.

If you’re really paranoid, you can stop using email all together.  If that’s too drastic, you can go into your email provider settings/preferences and disable or block automatic image downloading.