Any reliable way to know if emails are opened?

My dev team is telling me that the tracking tools are no longer reliable.
SMTP/POP3 do not support a direct way to confirm it's read or open.

Do you guys know of any plug in or app to add that is reliable and not FOS (i tried a few chrome apps and the results were BS..).

 

Only ones I know are SpyPig and IfRead. I've used spypig but only for a couple of emails. It's been a while and I've honestly no current knowledge of how reliable it is.
All of the tracking I'm familiar with has worked by embedding an image in the email - could be 1x1 pixels - and hosting that image where you can track accesses. Obviously can be circumvented.

 

Thanks i will try Spypig. The 1x1 pixel is what we used to do but not most mailboxes ask before opening an image so the numbers are no longer representative.

 

I'm glad you posted on this topic - a few weeks ago I received a follow-up email from a marketing campaign that said "we notice you haven't opened our last email - are you still interested" or words to that effect. I had wanted to take a closer look to see what sort of tracking they were using but had forgotten all about it.