Every one will be eager to know whether the mail send by you has been read or not by him/her  ( Especailly love letters , email campaigns , news letters etc ) right ?

Today I would love to share with you how you can track this . I am not going to write any code. But will go through how you can acheive this . I hope you are a web-developer or know something about programming in PHP .

I am going through some of the functions in PHP . There will be similar functions in .NET too . The swiftmailer already have a function to send whether the mail is opened or not . But it will ask the user the permission before sending it .

I am going through a different one . Every one knows the mail function . Either we can use the php mail or swiftmailer or phpmailer or Zend_Mail any to send mails . Its easy to send mails with Swiftmailer . Now we need to get the confirmation for the mail send right ?

We all know its easy to create dynamic images with the PHP GD library . Every one would have created it for captcha images right ? . So we need to write some PHP code to create a dynamic image . So the link will be something like http://example.com/mygd-image.php which will output an image . If we are sending to a single person we don't need to pass values using GET . ie http://example.com/mygd-image.php?openedBy=5467 . But when its for email campaigns and all we need a way to track which person has opened the mail . We will be having the names of the users and corresponding key ( I mean primary key or we can create a hash based on the mail or something different according to your logic ) . We just need to pass that to the link which creates the image . Track it using the PHP GET method and update the database . Yes now you know whether the mail is opened or not .

There is also a possibility that the images will be blocked . The reason why the images is blocked is due to these type of things which will be used for bad also . For eg : spammers can check whether the email address is faque or not using just sending these sort of mails . So when you open the mail and the image loads it confirms your email address . So gmail usually blocks these type of images .

The image is taken from the flickr photostream of Davide Restivo http://www.flickr.com/people/somemixedstuff/ ( Thanks and credits for the image to him ) . I hope I have not missed any  . You can look the php gd library for how to create dynamic images . The mail functions and your favourite php library to send mails . Thanks guys . That's all for today . Enjoy .