Is there any way to control sent mail in ASP.NET?

Question

I have two questions.

First one is simple: Is there any way to control priority of mails while sending those in ASP.NET? For example i have a dating website and there are few types of mails send. One is registration mail and other are less important like new message in inbox for those who want this information. There are many users on website and lots of mails are send which makes important mails like registration one which should come instantly to come after dozen of new message in inbox messages.

Second one: Is there a way to check whether user opened certain email or not? Let's say i want to check how much users received new message in inbox mail and just viewed it opposite to those who viewed and entered the website afterward with link available in email.

thanks, any info is appreciated.

Answer 1

1. No. If you send though your own SMTP server, this one might allow for some kind of traffic shaping, but as soon as the mail is released "into the wild", you are out of luck.

2. There were some methods for that, such as Web bugs; the Wikipedia article on E-mail tracking has a nice overview. However, most modern mail clients block these things, for example, by not showing images by default. Note also that it is considered extremely impolite to do something like that, since you are violating the privacy of your customers.

Answer 2

your case is one of the many reason there are full time email campaign companies. they handle all of this heavy lifting and have worked through the issues you are inevitable to encounter.

We use responsys and from what I gather they are happy with them. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of email marketing companies that charge pennies for emails sent. If you plan to do any sort of routing or analytics they are well worth the investment.

Answer 3

First question:

• Step 1. Create a table containing email data in rows, including subject, content, recipients, etc, along with a priority flag.
• Step 2. Build a windows service that will query the database for the next 50 most important email to send, then repeat the process.

This will allow you to scale a lot. You must handle hundred of mails per minute ? No problem, install your service on a second machine that access the same database (cluster).

Second question:

• Add an hidden tracking image in the mail body. When the image will be called (the user is reading the mail), the tracking will be done, and you will update the row of the table mentionned in first question answer.
• Create proper reporting based on the table above.