Exact duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/185204/is-there-a-way-to-determine-whether-an-e-mail-reaches-its-destination
Hi all,
I heard that it's possible to determine how many people opened a newsletter and analyze WHEN they opened the mail.
I just wanted to know how that's possible... is it necessary to generate a "read confirmation" or is such an analysis possible without letting the recipient know?
Thanks a lot for your input...
See also Is there a way to determine whether an e-mail reaches its destination?, my answer repeated below:
If you make the email HTML based, you can include images in it which contain URLs with information unique to the recipient. You could structure your application so that these URLs trigger some code to mark that particular email as read before returning the required image data.
To be totally effective, the images would have to form a key part of the email, so that the recipient has to make their email client grab the images. You could also make the plain text part of the email just contain a URL to retrieve the full message, again allowing you to track receipt.
How far you take these ideas depends on why you need to know it's been read and to what extent you want to potentially annoy the recipient with an email they can't cut'n'paste, read easily on mobile device, listen to with a screenreader, etc...
There is no way to guarantee that someone has opened your newsletter e-mail. But you can get a clue of how many time it was opened by embedding a one pixel image in you mail and use the statistics of you web server to determine how often it was requested.