Mass Emailing and tracking

[Dr.WiggY]

Hi

Well im stuck.

My problem involves sending mass emails (which I have no troubles doing) and what I want to be able to do is keep track of the emails I send and also have the option in the email to either opt-in or opt-out and refer friends if they choose to keep receiving the information that is sent (mostly standard stuff)
But a function I’d wish to add is the ability to track the emails by number
Ie 0001, 0002 etc.. and be able to go back and see how the response from those emails was. Sure that sounds simple enough, but keep in mind that im already using a database to store the emails and whether they view the email and also whether or not they submit their details and refer friends. (if somebody is referred then the ID of the person who referred them has to be kept in order to let the referee know who is having this information sent to them). Im not asking anyone for code or to do this for me but basically for advice on a method of going about doing this if anyone knows how to or if you need more information then let us know because this is making my brain start to hurt.

[oracleguy]

Just do this, since you should have a primary key for the table that contains the email addresses, just use that.

So when the e-mail goes out it could just have a link like such:

<a href="http://blah.mydomain.com/emails/refer_a_friend.asp?uID=2882">Refer a friend!</a>

Obviously uID=blah would be the primary key in the dbase. Then your page can take that number and look up the information. And you can record the response taken by the user.

[Dr.WiggY]

thanks for that.

but i already had a similar idea worked out for that
the thing im most stuck on is tracking statistics for each email.
For instance email 0125 to be able to track that email for how many people opt-in and how many people opt-out and also how many view the email. therefore i would then be able to make graphs out of that and see what emails got the best results.