Tracking Emails When They Are Read

I don't know about US law, but if you were doing this in the UK I very strongly suspect you'd be falling foul of the Data Protect Act, on the basis you're collecting, storing and presumably processing identifiable personal information (you know the email address and you're associating that with their internet activity), without telling the recipient that you're doing it.

Maybe that's legal in the US, but it doesn't sound very ethical!

I did make this thread on the older version, but no one really could help me with this. An email marketing company had a web application that I'm describing. But I don't know how they did it without images or links. I have a cards application that will tell me when someone has read his/her card. But it is only because the user has to go to the link to read the card.

 

 

If I understand correctly you want to count which emails are read.  If they are HTML emails, this is fairly easy to do.  The general technique is the same as counting any HTML page.

The easist way is to include a transparent 1x1 pixel image and write a script to process the request:

img src="ht**://www.somesite.com/countme.asp?parm=xxx"

** is tp and the brackets are missing.  mycount.asp is a script that will do the counting and return the image.  The parm may be something like emai1234.

Javascript can be added to the HTML to do the same thing.  Here you make what looks like a remote Javascript load and it is really just another way to call mycount.asp.

With a little work you may load a fake CSS script in place of the one-pixel image.  If you call your logo or a banner by going to a script rather than a page, the need for a one-pixel image also can be avoided.

Anyway you can call your server during page load time works.

There are commercial packages that can do this, but if all you want is a count it is easy in ASP.  When you want to tie together the read, a resulting click-thru and a sale or registration things get more complicated and the package solution is probably better.

With email being filtered with spam filters, I feel every newsletter should be tracking their opens.  A 40% open rate is considered golden and few newsletters are getting even getting that.

This might be a sneaky tactic, but it works very similarly to what cyril_kearney suggested.  I know some companies (ad companies) use a similar method using a little java applet on their html emails.

I have a little barcode image at the very bottom left of my page that returns hit statistics (Number of visits, date and time, geographical location etc...).  The barcode generated there just reffers to "Ghostnetworks" as in <img src="barcode.asp?code=GHOSTNETWORKS" >, but could be altered to display the username of the email recipient. 

Every time the html newsletter is opened, the image is dynamically generated as <img src="barcode.asp?user=username" > now when the image is generated via barcode.asp it also returns that the user has read the email.  Of course, this only works if the user opted to recieve his/her email in html format.

I hope that was clear enough.