Attempting to collect email

Question

I wrote an email application in PHP that processes very large mailing lists. Is there any way to find out which emails are open and by whom? Any decision will be made as long as it can tell me if the user really received and opened the email. I do not want to use mail receipts, as this may delay the recipients.

If relevant, I am using the frameworkIgniter framework.

Answer 1

You can accomplish this by including a small tracking image in each email you send.

<img src="http://yourdomain.com/tracking/1x1.gif?cId=12345&uId=56789"> 

Use mod-rewrite to pull everything outside of '/ tracking /' into your analytics script, hook the query_string line and return 1x1 gif to email clients.

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From campaign monitor:

http://help.campaignmonitor.com/topic.aspx?t=89

When each email is sent, we automatically add a snippet of code that requests a tiny, invisible image from our web servers. Therefore, when the reader opens the email, the image is downloaded, and we can record this download as open for that specific email.

It is important to understand that an open course is not a 100% accurate measurement. Recording "open" can only if the reader's email client is able to display html from the image, and this option is enabled. Therefore, if you send text emails, there is no way to record open bets. Similarly, people reading your html email address without displaying images will not be recorded as open (unless they click the link).

Another problem is that your readers may have a preview panel in their email client. This preview pane can automatically display emails (and therefore download images) without having the reader ever click on it or read it.

So, you should never discover as a hard and fast number, because you can never know the true figure. It is much better used as a general guide and as a way to measure trends in your email campaign.

Answer 2

You can put a tiny invisible img in each email, with each image differently corresponding to a specific email address. Then you parse your access logs and see which images were requested, and you know which emails were opened.

This is not flawless proof, but I have seen some companies use this method.

Answer 3

Receipts are read here, but they are only supported by specific clients (i.e. Outlook), and even then they are given the opportunity not to notify you of their reading.

The only other option is to communicate with your server while reading email. To do this, you can implement a tracking pixel, which is a transparent 1x1 gif. You can intercept the response on your server and record the time, date, IP address, etc.

This is still not reliable, because some clients, such as gmail, do not display images by default.

You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_tracking