Hackensack, N.J. ? If Paul Goldstein’s dream comes true, never again will someone be able to use the old “I never got your e-mail” excuse — unless they really didn’t get it.

Goldstein’s company is rolling out a service today that allows e-mail users to confirm their message was read, how long the recipient spent reading it, and where, approximately, the recipient read it. In most cases, the person reading the message won’t be any the wiser.

For $50 a year, a person will be able to track as many as 750 messages a month, said Goldstein, vice president for product development for Rampell Software, a tiny company in Cambridge, Mass.

The service is likely to strike many e-mail users as an invasion of privacy, especially because they won’t know that the sender is checking up on them.

“George Orwell would be proud,” said Jay Gerard, a retired music teacher and avid computer user in River Vale, N.J.

But Goldstein said it was perfectly reasonable for someone to verify that their e-mail navigated the many servers, routers, and spam filters between someone’s PC and someone else’s in-box. Fred Langa, publisher of a popular technology newsletter, conducted an experiment in November that found 40 percent of regular, nonspam e-mails don’t make it to their intended targets.

“Let’s say you have a bid going out for a project, and there’s a bid deadline, and you send it out by e-mail,” Goldstein said. “You’re going to want to know that every person got it OK.”

America Online subscribers have a similar capability, but only when sending e-mail to other AOL users. Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail program allows senders to confirm that their messages have been delivered.

But to confirm that the message actually has been read, the recipient must be an Outlook user as well and must agree to send the confirmation.

DidTheyReadIt, in contrast, will keep tracking the e-mail even after it is opened. It will show how often someone opened a message, whether that person forwarded it to others, and whether those people read it.

DidTheyReadIt will not show the actual location of the recipient, but the location of the recipient’s Internet provider. In some cases, that could be in another state.