Is email marketing ruined for everyone?
Thursday, August 14th, 2008
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?
