Is email marketing ruined for everyone?
eWrite Messenger Login
Recently I have been working on ‘eWrite Messenger’. It allows a business to build up and manage an address book of email addresses and send out email newsletters to as many people as they like.
The main feature of eWrite Messenger is being able to send out these emails and record if readers are receiving the emails, if they are reading the emails and what links are they clicking.
One of the methods used to record this information is using PHP to add a unique email ID and a user ID into each email. When the email is loaded a PHP script disguised as an image is loaded and the email ID and user ID are passed to it via a querystring. The script then saves this information which allows the progamme to know which user opened which email.
eWrite Messenger - Recently sent emails
This process is well known and often blocked by many anti virus programmes either on the users email server or the server sending out the emails in the first place.
My question is WHY???
As always there is probably a way to abuse this approach to rob a persons emails or address book. Why isn’t there an accepted form of logging information from an email? We all have Google Analytics or similar on our sites and blogs which log far more information about every visitor. Why isn’t this allowed in email?
Adding this information to links in an email still works. This allows a programme to see what link was clicked by a user. It doesn’t allow a programme to log if an email was opened however and so any user who opens an email but doesn’t click on the links isn’t logged.
Another method I want to try out is using server logs. For every email newsletter created and for every user in the address book a unique image is created, probably something very small and insignificant. When a newsletter is sent out it embeds the approprate image into the email. Not a PHP script disguised as an image, just a regular image. Then using the server logs one can see what images were requested from the server.
The problem with this is that the servers don’t allow PHP code to access the logs. 2 hosting companies I use both have logs that a user can access by FTP but don’t allow PHP code to access them. Blacknight only keeps logs for 5 days!
To me, allowing PHP to access the logs to determine if specific images were loaded allows for a great way to work out what emails were loaded and by which users. No progamme or user has to worry about anti virus programmes getting in the way since they are normal everyday images being loaded.
Anyone else work in this area and have any comments or suggestions?
Tags: blacknight, server logs
August 14th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Hey
Why don’t you just include a “image” at the href “http://ewritecork.com/email received/userID-emailID.jpg” then add a .htaccess file with a mod rewiterule that requests “http://ewritecork.com/email received/?uid=userID&eid=emailID” and have the php script there record the request and send a 1×1 blank jpg
It’s worth baring in mind that most email programs/services block images by default but I’m sure you factor that in when look at the results allready
August 14th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Thats a good idea. I must test it out. The problem with that though is that not every site supports htaccess.
August 14th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Email was not designed to allow tracking and it has been abused so much over the years that email clients and servers have had to implement steps to protect users.
Tracking open rates is not very useful anymore anyway, as most email clients won’t load images.
You can easily track clicks, which is a lot more useful and is something we do with our own newsletters
August 14th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Yes, I was glad to see your own newsletters use the same methods in the links.
I agree that tracking open rates may not be too useful, its a shame to miss out on information like this though. Imagine not bothering to track the people opening a website because they haven’t clicked on any of the links.