How check our email has been read in webmail using PHP

Question

Is there anyway we can track our email has been read or not using php. If i am sending mails to 10 persons i need to know how many people has read the email and their email address. Is there a way to do this

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

No. There is no reliable way to do this - all the known ways are used by spammers, and therefore most e-mail clients block them by default.

That said, there are numerous ways - but don't expect any of them to be reliable:

• embed an external image/image bug in your HTML mail, with a query string that's a hash of the address, then parse the access logs on your server.
• embed a script
• request a reply and track those

Answer 2

I am not affiliated with this site in anyway just first result Google came up with, (there are a few others also) but see http://trackemailmarketing.com/ (Googled EMail marketing tracking)

As for you doing this on your own, it is possible, if you can come up with the logic and how it will work. There are a ton of problems to overcome, however, given the many different clients with different limitations (ie clients blocking) etc.

Answer 3

it is most connected with a grafical item like a 1x1 pixel or other images. Best way, yout generate the pixel with php.

then you add code like this one to your email

the file pixel.php create a img file and make a mysql quety to your DB that email with ID 1 was opened.

The same theory with Links.

There is no way to track openings of text emails.

I also provide a email makreting tool, just mail me if you habe interest.

alexander[AT]fincha[dot]com

Answer 4

You can use image bugs aka tracking pixels (because they are usually invisible 1x1 images). Don't expect this to be 100% reliable, since there's a chance that because of that email clients will flag your emails as spam. Some clients just won't request images at all.

That's how litmus tracks their emails, with several metrics: whether an email was forwarded, printed, how long it's been read, etc. Their foundation is... Image bugs. I explained how each of those work here.

Embedding any kind of javascript code will increase the likelihood of a spam flag by orders of magnitude. Don't do that.

Answer 5

There is no way to reliably do this, in no small part because modern email clients have taken steps to prevent you from doing this.

You can try implementing "web bugs", small images with a unique link sent to each recipient, so that you can see when the image is loaded from your server, but that requires the user (again, at least in modern email clients) to explicitly say "load images".

You can, however, provide links to content that you control, again with per-message unique identifiers, to see who's interested in your content.

Answer 6

There aren't any guaranteed reliable ways to do this. There are a number of methods that work some of the time, but there's no way to be certain. Most of the methods that could have been reliable are routinely blocked by end users due to spam.

The most common way is to send an HTML email with graphics that are loaded from your site (or quite frequently from a third-party tracking agency's site). The graphic would be loaded and the URL would be spiked with a unique ID so you know which recipient has loaded it.

However this only works if the user (a) reads their email in HTML mode, (b) allows it to load graphics, and (c) reads it while they're online.

Some techniques use Javascript to perform a similar task. But that has all the same issues, and can also be stopped by users blocking Javascript in their email.

The best method (ie the most socially acceptable one, and least likely to be blocked) is to provide a link for the user to click on to get more info, which has a unique ID. This of course doesn't tell you what's been read, but it does tell you who's interested in what they've read, which is probably more valuable to know anyway.

The down side of all these methods is the need to give each user a unique ID. This means that each email you send has to be unique, which means quite a big processing overhead for your mail system as it has to re-generate the text for every single user. This is the reason that most people who do this sort of thing delegate the task to a third party tracking agency.

Answer 7

I know this answer comes bloody late, but it might be useful.

If what you want is to estimate how many people read your newsletter, there is one possibility that you probably could use. It asks the user to take action, but it gives you probably the most accurate numbers. It only works when you are sending to very many recipients.

• Add an image bug.
• Add a small (per-email unique) text link, telling that 'for marketing purposes, please click here if you read the email.' (Don't expect everybody to click it, just read on. ;-) ) If you really don't like this, you could even use an 'unsubscribe' link, and calculate how many recipients have unsubscribed.
• Track how many times the image bug has been resolved.
  • Divide the recipients in 2 groups:
    • Group A that accessed the image bug. All people in this group displayed the message on screen.
    • Group B that doesn't have the image bug respond. Some of the people in this group might have read the message, but their e-mail clients blocked the image.
• Calculate how many percent of the people within group A clicked the link.
• Calculate - assuming the percentage is the same in group B - how many times the message would have been displayed on screen if the same percentage of people clicked the link.

Example:

• You've sent 10000 newsletters with different IDs (i.e. ID 1 - 10000)
• After one month, the image bug was resolved 3000 times. You feel great, at least 3000 readers!
• The link was clicked 500 times. 300 of the clicks on the link came from e-mails that also resolved the image bug.
• Now, you can calculate. 300 of the 3000 image resolving mails reported the click, that is 10%.
• So: 10% of the users that read the newsletter actually clicked the link.
• So, 500 clicks in total would mean 5000 e-mails that were read.

You see, while the image bug only resolved 3000 times, you have reason to believe that approximately 5000 people actually read (i.e. displayed) the message.