Does anyone know anything about tracking email messages

Here's one for all you hi-tech people out there

Can anyone shed some light on what it takes to track an email for results.
example: Deliver time, opened time, bounced, etc.

I know it can be done, but I'm not sure how to do it.
I also wasn't sure in statcounter has that feature.

[grbeneke]

Yes it can be done - but there are a lot more issues regarding security hurdles that have to be overcome:
Try poping the StatCounter code into an email message and you'll find that the results you get will be allong the lines of 99% users with JavaScript disabled - just about all mail clients come with JavaScript disabled as standard for security reason.
Also some - like Thunderbird which i use - will also block the loading of external images which is the only other method SC is able to track visits.
So it can be done - but your results are not going to be accurate.
<<edit>> This sort of tracking is however not allowed on the StatCounter service <<edit>>

On another point - a very useful little trick i discovered a couple of days ago - if you want to find out that your visitors have clicked on a link in your email: SC can't track that as a referer - it shows as "hidden referer" or something i think. So just add a little dummy post-data like "....html?ref=eml" and even if your page is not capable of processing that data - SC will show that as a page URL and you can track it.

[webado]

Originally Posted by grbeneke

Yes it can be done - but there are a lot more issues regarding security hurdles that have to be overcome:
Try poping the StatCounter code into an email message and you'll find that the results you get will be allong the lines of 99% users with JavaScript disabled - just about all mail clients come with JavaScript disabled as standard for security reason.
Also some - like Thunderbird which i use - will also block the loading of external images which is the only other method SC is able to track visits.
So it can be done - but your results are not going to be accurate.

On another point - a very useful little trick i discovered a couple of days ago - if you want to find out that your visitors have clicked on a link in your email: SC can't track that as a referer - it shows as "hidden referer" or something i think. So just add a little dummy post-data like "....html?ref=eml" and even if your page is not capable of processing that data - SC will show that as a page URL and you can track it.

Errr... if you try to use Statcounter for that, you'll be contravening a whole bunch of rules.

[grbeneke]

Which? the first or the second part??

[robinev]

Originally Posted by grbeneke

Yes it can be done - but there are a lot more issues regarding security hurdles that have to be overcome:

Sigh... And people wonder why StatCounter gets flagged by some malware prophylactics.

[grbeneke]

Ok i know that its not really recomended - well not at all in fact - to have javascript in emails, so can that idea.
But what if you use a tracked graphic - i mean i know some of the email i get has graphics embedded and i'm sure they senders can track my views of the mail by looking at the server logs - is the same not possible with the HTML only SC code (and Christina is it allowed? couldn't find anything in "terms & cond")

[webado]

Originally Posted by grbeneke

Which? the first or the second part??

You are not allowed to attempt to introduce tracking by Statcounter code within an email message. This qusetion was asked some time agao and Webmaster made it quite clear it was not allowed. Incidentally it wouldn't actually work anyway.

I do wonder what happens if you send somebody a web page by email, and said web page has the counter on it

[webit]

Embed an image from a remote machine and include parameters which ID the user (this will be stripped out by the server before the image is returned to the browser.)

[webado]

Originally Posted by webit

Embed an image from a remote machine and include parameters which ID the user (this will be stripped out by the server before the image is returned to the browser.)

That is the idea in the html-only portion of the counter.

It may however be blocked by many email client programs. It is also against the Statcounter rules.

[webit]

A lot of email clients do block by default. The trick was used alot to test if a email address was live.

When you say it is against statcounter rules what I'm talking about is totally seperate from Statcounter. It would pull the image back from a script on your server.