Email Tracking

loureiro

Hello,

I have writen here before about this but no one really said anything that I could use and I'm hoping this time around someone can help.

I am trying to count how many times an email gets open. What I am trying to do right now is I'm sending them a php page with the code to increment a field in a database. this is all I need to do. just increment a field in a database.

My problem right now is that when i send the email it tries to connect to that persons email server instead of connecting to mine.

I wanted to know if there was a way to get the script to connect to my server remotely instead of connecting it with the localhost attribute in the mysql_connect function.

If anyone could think of another way to do this that would also be helpful. I have already tried to connect through an image tag but iot didnt work.

Please Help! thanks.

dbchip2000

I don't believe that there is any way to access another web users email account, much less read their email. PHP can access IMAP servers if you know the email address and the password, and even then, normal email servers do not count the number of times and email has been read. I only know of being able to see if the email has been read via IMAP

One thing you could do, is create a little icon that you could put on the bottom of an email and then create the image source to be a PHP page, such as picture.php, where it would connect to the database and increment the count. You would have to use some query variables so you can accurately track which email is requesting the picture

If you are attempting to send them an actual PHP page with coding in the email, you will be unsuccessful, since PHP is a server-side language. Meaning, it is just like you renaming the PHP file you are sending as an email to HTML and then opening it. (ex picture.php => picture.html)

stolzyboy

what he said :rolleyes:

as far as creating a blank image with src to the phppage.php that does what you want

that's about all you are gonna be able to do

r270ba

Even if you could do that you would be compromising the integrity of your data b/c they would then I access to your server's password (via the php code). Don't think that would be smart to do.

loureiro

i have already tested sending the php page and i have found that you cannot do that! I would never do anything without first testing it. i have already tried to send the script via an img tag however it did not increment the database. just a note: i wasnt asking how to crack into someone's email. all i was asking is how to send a php script to increment a database.

please help with the img tag thing.

i have already tried it like this:

<img src="count.php"> and it didnt work. what should i do?

stolzyboy

read this page, this is how it is done

http://forums.devshed.com/archive/5/2002/08/3/41846

loureiro

thanks. I didnt realize in order for it to work you have to return an image file. anyways...i have that done but now im having another problem! I only want it to increment when the user creates it. and i want it to increment another field when the recipient opens it. how would i go about distinguishing between the two? soryy, i know its a lot of questions to be asking one after another but I could really use some help on this one! thanks

loureiro

can someone explain to me what kingmike meant. im currently having this problem right now

Uchechi What am I doing wrong....

I first of all just for testing purposes created a PHP page with the following code.

Lets call this file trackit.php

echo "image.jpg";

I created a second file which was HTML. It had the following code below.

<img src="trackit.php" lowsrc="2ndimage.jpg">

However, the image doesn't show up. Is this code correct?
kingmike If you are going to display an image through a php tracking script then you can't just echo the image name.

You have to use header and passthru.