Email tracking tech isn’t new, we’ve been reporting on the stuff for years. For example back in 2008 we were rather impressed with MSGTAG, which combined a nice interface with the instant ability to track which of your recipients opened and read your messages. We also liked the fact that it was free to use and coped with a large selection of email clients.

Well times change, and there are now probably more web mail and mobile email users than PC clients like Outlook Express, so it’s interesting to see the launch of Bananatag, a new service which promises to track every type of email message, from phone, clients and web. There’s a lot of clever tech going on behind the scenes, but it’s the user interface that is most impressive.

As well as receiving the typical information about which of your lucky recipients open and read your email messages, you also receive a report detailing which links have been clicked over time. This is great if you’re sending out sales emails to your customers and want to know how a particular promotion is going. The service also offers other nice features (like a link library function so you can insert regularly used links into your emails easily each time) which show that they’ve thought about the issues of small company email a lot.

It works with desktop email clients like Outlook, web mail services like Hotmail and Gmail via browser plugins and also mobile email and other email systems (to start the tracking you just have to add “btag.it” at the end of the target email address when you compose the message). Currently the service is free in beta for up to 5 messages a day, and eventually it looks like the cost will be something like $9.95 a month for 100 messages a day.