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View Full Version : email tracking through image


josh4
08-07-2008, 02:29 AM
I have an email list of 4,000 people from signups to our vBulletin forums. I tried experimenting with a way to track who opens the email. I wrote a php script to log who opened it before serving an image.
<img src="host.com/script.php?username=test">

It seemed to work at first, as there were people being logged. I understand the obvious drawbacks to this, such as spam filtering, and email clients blocking images. Only its been a couple days now and I've only logged about 250 people. That doesn't seem right, out of 4,000?

binaryWeapon
08-07-2008, 03:48 AM
Its entirely possible that the rest of the people haven't checked their mail yet, or it has been marked as spam, or can't be bothered to unblock the image (most email services block images and sometimes HTML content by default, and then give the option "Images on this email have been blocked. Click here to unblock them.")