Are there any way to know whether user open mail ?

Question

we build newsletter module, and send email to members. The environment is LAMP. Are there any way to know whether member open the mail ? i hear about put image if 'php' source , what is the best way?

Answer 1

A common way to check if an email has been read is a web beacon, which is usually a small 1x1px invisible image that is loaded from your server, which can track when the image has been loaded and therefore the email has been read.

This is not guaranteed to work, however, since many email clients block images in their emails or your readers could be using text-only email clients.

Answer 2

Ultimately there is obviously no fool-proof way to get notifications, because there is no guaranteed way of getting the email client to respond back in some fashion; the email client can be set up to just interpret the incoming email as ASCII text and nothing more, and there is nothing you can do about that.

However; in most cases if you are emailing to users that are expecting an email, odds are that HTML rendering and inline images are probably turned on for your source address, so using an inline IMG tag and monitoring access to the referenced file (obviously using some per-user unique ID in the reference) should give you the best you are going to get.

Regardless you'll never be able to make the assumption that if you do not get a notification back that that means the user has not seen the email.

Answer 3

Yes, there is a standard mechanism (RFC 3798) called read receipts. It is implemented by all modern mail clients, and the user can choose to send (or not) the reciept as they choose.

There are also various non-standard subterfuges for doing this without the user's consent, which I won't detail.

EDIT:

It should be like the below (using built-in PHP mail function):

mail("[email protected]", "Let me know if you get this", "Important message", "Disposition-Notification-To: [email protected]\r\n");

Answer 4

Each email has a uniquely named image in it corresponding to the users account (or db row), when that image is loaded or accessed, you can see which user has opened the email. This relies on the user receiving HTML emails though.

Answer 5

There's no foolproof way to do it since you're not the one in control of the email client. Many people take their privacy seriously enough to prevent read-receipts, web beacons and all the other tricks which can be used to detect the reading (people can turn off read receipts, block images, prevent unsolicited outgoing connections and so on).

This is my opinion of course but I believe you're approaching the problem the wrong way. Instead of trying to force the user to let you know if they've read the email, just make it worth their while. It's obviously of some benefit to you to have this information (otherwise why do it?) so you share that benefit around and make sure it's the user's decision.

That way, you turn the relationship from a battleground into a partnership (win/win).

Answer 6

I don't know if email image is the right solution, how did mailing software does to know the amount of opened emails ?