Can I Get Read Receipts?

We are sometimes asked if we can turn on read receipts for outgoing email. At this time we do not have that feature enabled. We did it at one point and found out that it is impossible to make it accurate enough for school usage. It is good as an indicator for marketing emails, but has too much inherent "false positives" and "false negatives" to rely upon. The problem is that many popular email readers will always give the wrong results using the most accurate method. 

For example: 
Outlook's default settings do not show graphics, so it would be a false negative.
iPhone's email reader hits the pixel and it would be a false positive. 

In other words -- it's handy for marketing purposes, but even the most accurate approach out they probably cannot be more than 90% accurate. So to have a school rely on the answer would be really bad. When we researched it (and even briefly implemented it) several years ago, those were the results, and that is using the most accurate method ever created. The method is to have a pixel that ties to a URL and then mark based on that URL being hit. Therefore, if the graphics are blocked (Outlook) they can read the contents without marking it as read. And if they are in an email reader that touches the graphics without displaying (which is what iPhone did years ago -- haven't checked lately), then it thinks they opened it yet they didn't.  This would be the case for any email reader that pre-renders for performance reasons. And "email opened" indicator is a handy macro tool for general macro indicators.  It is worthless if you are counting on the results of any particular email. 

This was a result of extensive analysis we did on this feature several years ago.