Check if email is read

[marcebra]

Hello,

I want to make sure that the people that I am sending an email to are actually reading the email and not just deleting (and in turn, wasting my resources). I found a code on this site that worked like this:

<IMG SRC="http://www.myserver.com/email_confirm.php3?email=myemail%40myserver.com" WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1 ALT="" BORDER=0>

But I am not sure, exactly, how to implement it. First off, the "%40" is there to represent the "@" symbol. To be converting it, it would be a lot of work. Would it be possible to have the "@" symbol in the email and still be working?

Also, what code would I use to be adding the email to a database? I am quite new to php and never coded a page that adds a line to a database (I have only read information). I would appreciate it if someone code post the code that is required to do this.

Thanks a lot in advance,

[s_shrum]

There is no way to reliably tell if a user is just deleting your sent mail (even I turn off return reciept requests).

I'm not to sure that most email clients would handle that string like a http call. Remember that must email clients are set up to handle basic text. Granted, Outlook does allow for HTML emails but even there users have the option to revert to text based mail.

So in light of this, not all email clients will 'trigger' the call you want. Only those that have HTML email capabilities that have this option on.

As for the %40 = @ ... urldecode & urlencode for that

HTH

Sean Shrum
http://www.shrum.net