Email tracking is a method for monitoring the email delivery to the intended recipient.

Most tracking technologies use some form of digitally time-stamped record to reveal the exact time and date that an email was received or opened, as well the IP address of the recipient.

Mail merge is a process to create personalized letters and pre-addressed envelopes or mailing labels for mass mailings from a form letter.

The feature is usually employed on a word processing document which contains fixed text (which is the same in each output document) and variables (which act as placeholders that are replaced by text from the data source).

The feature dates back to early word processors on personal computers, circa 1980.

WordStar was perhaps the earliest to provide this, originally via an ancillary program called MailMerge.

WordPerfect also offered this capacity for CP/M and MS-DOS systems, and Microsoft Word added it later on.

Gmail is a free, advertising-supported email service developed by Google.

Users can access Gmail on the web and through the mobile apps for Android and iOS, as well as through third-party programs that synchronize email content through POP or IMAP protocols.

Gmail started as a limited beta release on April 1, 2004.

It exited beta status on July 7, 2009.

Vocus was a public relations software company based in Beltsville, Maryland, United States, serving clients worldwide from 1992 to 2014.

In addition to its web-based PR software suites, the company owns the online publicity services, PRWeb and Help a Reporter Out (HARO).

Vocus was founded in 1992 by Rick Rudman and Bob Lentz and was a publicly held company until June 2014 when it was taken private by Chicago-based private equity company GTCR.

The company operates additional offices in the United States, Europe and Asia.

Since late 2014, the company merged with Cision AB to form Cision Inc. as the succeeding company.