HELP! running php off another server through email

[loureiro]

alright. this is a tricky one and im not sure if you can do it. what we want to do is create some tracking php for an email template. what happens is we send the user a php file and they in turn use it as an email template. what we want to do is everytime someone opens up the template we want to increment a counter on a database. we have everything set up right now but here is our problem. when the person who is receiving the file opens it it is trying to run the php on that server and also trying to connect to the databse on their mail server! we want it to connect to the database on our server! is there a way to do this? am i explaining it well enough? please help!

[jonathen]

Perhaps you have specified the mysql server within the php file as 'localhost'? That's the only reason I can see for a file trying to connect to a mysql db on the user's local machine. If you specify the mysql host as the public hostname of your mysql server, that should mean when the execute the code it connects to your mysql server (providing the user is online, and that you have allowed that user's ip to connect)

Or have I completely misunderstood your question?

HTH

Jonathen

[loureiro]

yeah i was checking that out but i think there might be another problem with that. what if the person's email server does not support php? it wouldnt run then would it? so what im asking is is there a way to get it to run on the server and then generate the html code and then send it to the persons server?

[sdjensen]

Let me see I get this right.

You send a html file with php code in it to your users.
If the user reads his/her mail, then you want a counter to go up by one.

If this is the case, then you cannot do this. php is parsed on the server and if you send the phpcode to the user then he/she will be able to read your code directly.

But what you can do is add this line to your html code <img src="www.yourwebserver.xx/countmein.php"> and let the script countmein.php increase the counter.

[loureiro]

is countmein.php a counter already on PHP or would i have to create it? cause i already had the script that worked and its not working now with the whole img tag thing