Hey all. I'm trying to work out what tricks there are in SMTP/HTML emails to do the following:

1. Track an undeliverable email response back to the original email sent. I've looked at custom headers/parsing content but I don't think SMTP servers have a standard on how an undelivered email should be sent and may strip content / headers. I was thinking address extensions (rfc 5233) in the from address might help but I'm not sure if this will break email clients or spam filters.

2. Tell when a user opens an email. Exchange has read receipts, but I don't think they are standardised amongst SMTP servers or mail clients and I think it would be pretty easy to bypass. I've heard of HTML emails with HREF's to a tracking site that can track when the client tries to view a referenced image, but clients also disable viewing images (probably for this very reason).

I guess what I'm trying to do is already done by most spammers. But the company I work for wants this done more for compliance and legal reasons.

Anyone with experience with this sort of thing care to steer me in the right direction ?... :)

well f*** me, wikipedia has it all

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_tracking

jesus when did the internet get so easy to use :)

i deleted my previous thread...

who the f*** coded this forum ?!.. i got an error trying to create the thread... twice!

when did the internet get so hard to use:(

Trying to think of ways you could do it, but I cant think of one single thing that would work consistently

Numerous clients have asked me this question, want to be guaranteed that an email has been deliverd, and in reality, there realy isnt any way, apart from a reply from the recipeient to say they have recieved it.

I thought this was interesting...

Another kind of receipt can be requested, which is called a DSN (delivery service notification), which is a request to the recipients email server to send you a notification about the delivery of an email you've just sent. The notification takes the form of an email, and will tell you if your delivery succeeded, failed, got delayed, or will warn you if any email server involved was unable to give you a receipt

yeah nothing can be guaranteed. perhaps a different strategy would be best - such as have central to these crucial emails a call to action to read the message, being a link that gets clicked which can be tracked.

there are businesses that do this sort of open/click tracking of email campaigns. campaignmonitor.com mailchimp.com etc.

when I need to track emails I embed an image with a unique id

<img src="path_to_image.gif?id=blah">

and in your database id=blah can be traced to the persons email

the image is usually just a blank space

What happens if the image is blocked

i deleted my previous thread...

who the f*** coded this forum ?!.. i got an error trying to create the thread... twice!

when did the internet get so hard to use:(

http://network.ausgamers.com/index.php?action=listitems and hit undelete?

yeah nothing can be guaranteed

Yeah, that about sums it up. Thanks anyway.

My last job in the UK did just this. What they did was have a unique 1px becon image on the email. When that was pullled off the webserver, you assumed the email was opened.

Outlook 2007 blocks images by default, so tha kinda f***ed things up.

nearly every up to date email client does that