Tracking who read your mail

Well i had a very interesting code which i had to look on friday. So what is so interesting about this code, the answer is it magically tracks who read your mail.

No i am not talking about the outlook read receipt, that shows an annoying alert to the receiver saying "the person who sent it wants a receipt do you want to send yes/no" - who on earth would like to send this receipt, I always click no :)

So how do we solve the problem, you want to know whetehr the person to whom you sent it actually read it or not. So what do we do.

Let us answer few questions, does the person who receives your email has html viewing capacity, does he have internet access, if so bingo!!!!!!!!!!! our idea will work.

This is what you do,

Inside the email you place a hook, an image it could be a simple image not so fancy one of those 2 kb ones, the html tag can be something like,
img src = www.yourwebsite.com/tracker.gif?param=343343

So that does the trick, now what you do is write a server side code (either php or asp.net or jsp or some SSC) and you put a listener.

As soon as the person opens hte mail, it downloads the images and your site get a hit with the param, so you can identify whether the mail was opened or not.

Isnt that cool!!!!