Outlook 2000 has a feature where you can find out when the person has read your email. This only works for certain situations. This will not work if someone reads his/her email by using web mail (ex: Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.). The user has to be willing to send you a read receipt.

I am interested in creating a web application where you will be able to find out every time if someone has read your email without them knowing. I already have a cards application that will notify me every time someone has read the card by email. It is because the user has to go to a link to read the card.

Let me describe what I would like to do. I would like to have  a form on my web site where you will send the person a regular email with no links or pictures. I would like to store the information about the read receipt in a database on my web site.  I would like to be able to track when the user reads this particular email. As soon as the person opens the email in Outlook, web mail, etc, I would like for the information to be sent to the database on my web site. I would like to retrieve the following information: time read, date read, and IP address of the email user who read it.

Can anyone help me to write this code? Please understand that I want no links or images to be involved.

you ask the impossible

with no images involved.. this isn't going to happen, you have to give something in the email that goes back to the server, and all you have available in email is HTML, so it has to be something html-based that goes to the server to get it (screaming "image")

second, as for that outlook feature of "read receipts", that is something that is easily (and usually is) turned off

i also recall you making a thread on the old version of this site where the above was echoed many times

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.

no one provided an answer because what you asked/are-asking is not possible to do in "just" and email as explained above

but things are different if you are explaining properly:
if you/they provided a link in the email that someone click (and opened up a resultant webpage)

why wouldn't you just do this tracking when that web page gets generated?

seemingly that is what you have going on now.. just leave it as is if it works....

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.

Barcodes look cooler

Big brother's watching    lol