How can I configure my Gmail account so I can see if the message I sent was received or opened?

Short answer: You can't.





Long answer: What you're talking about is called a "Read Receipt". Some e-mail software let you request a read receipt from your recipient, but it's only a polite request, and it's up to the recipient whether or not (and, ultimately, when) they send the receipt, so it's no more effective than just asking them "Please reply to let me know you got this message." Plus, some e-mail tools don't understand read receipt requests at all (including GMail), so if you're sending mail to somebody who uses one of these tools, you wouldn't get an automatic response even if the recipient would have been happy for you to.





There are other ways to try to track e-mail, but none are flawless. You can embed an image in an e-mail, where that image is hosted on a web site that you control. The theory is that when the recipient opens the e-mail, they'll download the image, and your web server can e-mail you to let you know they did so (or you can just check the web server logs, later) - http://www.whoreadme.com/ is a free service that will help you do this. But more modern e-mail software - again, including GMail - won't show these images without asking the recipient's permission first, so it's still not a sure-thing.





Another option would be to put the contents online onto a web page, and to track when the web page is visited, then to e-mail the web address to the recipient. There are online tools that can help you with that too, like http://www.self-destructing-email.com/. Of course, the recipient could just ignore the link you send to them, but at least you'd know if and when they *had* clicked the link.





E-mail tracking is a complex and thorny issue, and there's no one solution that works in all cases. Good luck!