BlueTicks for Gmail
WhatsApp-style read receipts for Gmail
Three weeks ago I shipped BlueTicks, a Chrome and Firefox extension that puts WhatsApp-style ticks in your Gmail Sent list: one tick when the email goes out, two blue ticks the moment it is opened, in real time.
The itch was simple. I kept wondering whether my emails had been read, and every tracker I tried either demanded OAuth access to my whole mailbox or stamped a visible signature onto the message. Both felt disproportionate for something this small.
So the constraints came first: no OAuth, no access to the Google account, no email content on my servers, nothing added to what recipients receive. Subject lines and recipients stay in the browser. The detection itself is the classic tracking pixel, which means it has the classic limits (image proxies, Apple Mail Privacy Protection), and I would rather say that plainly than pretend detection is perfect.
Where it stands today: 25 users on the Chrome Web Store with five 5-star reviews, and 2 daily users on Firefox. That Firefox number is the interesting one. The add-on has been live since mid-July and the listing is genuinely good, but I only realised this week that not a single one of my directory listings actually linked to the Firefox page. They all said "Chrome and Firefox" in prose and then linked to Chrome. So the whole Firefox funnel was a dead end I had built myself.
The other thing I have been documenting is the directory grind. I have vetted around twenty launch directories that advertise a free tier. Most of them gate it behind putting their badge on my site, a queue measured in weeks, or a paywall that only appears at the last step. One of them showed free slots in its calendar while every single date was disabled in the markup. I keep a written log of which ones are honest.
A Peerlist launch went out on Monday and a Uneed launch is queued for August 16. There is a free tier with a monthly cap, and the paid plan is 4 dollars a year.
If you want to try it: Chrome Web Store https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/blueticks-for-gmail/hipmeeilnlifaoegpfiodlnapplogpkn and Firefox Add-ons https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blueticks-for-gmail/
Happy to answer anything about how the real-time delivery works, the privacy trade-offs, or the directory grind.
3 Comments
I liked that the constraints came before the implementation.
Sometimes the product isn't defined by what it can do, but by what it deliberately refuses to require from users. That tends to create a very different kind of trust.
That’s a much more interesting finding than simply saying “less access = more trust.” I’d be interested in continuing the conversation beyond the thread — would you be open to sharing the best email to reach you on?