email opened

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gecko
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Posts: 34
Joined: Thu Oct 24, 2002 3:45 am

email opened

Post by gecko »

does anyone know whether there is a way to check wheter someone has opened an email sent through the mail function.
thanks
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m3mn0n
PHP Evangelist
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Joined: Tue Aug 13, 2002 3:35 pm
Location: Calgary, Canada

Post by m3mn0n »

That's an invasion of privacy in my opinion, but there is a way to request the user send you a receipt.
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twigletmac
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Post by twigletmac »

Heh, just did tried this myself to see if I could force a read receipt for e-mails sent through our web site to internal users (to check if they are bothering to look at the mail sent to generic e-mail boxes). I found these two headers:

Code: Select all

Return-Receipt-To
for delivery receipts (which worked for me although did not send e-mail to the address I specified) and

Code: Select all

Disposition-Notification-To
for read receipts (which did not work for me). Maybe a Google on those will give you more info.

Mac
choppsta
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Post by choppsta »

With read receipts it's ultimately up to the recipient to decide whether or not they respond. So it's not that useful.

If you send an HTML email, you can include a small img tag that triggers a PHP script to confirm that it's been read (or do other things). This can be quite effective. But this obviously relies on the recipient having an email client that can read HTML.
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Derfel Cadarn
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Location: Berlin, Germany

Post by Derfel Cadarn »

choppsta wrote: If you send an HTML email, you can include a small img tag that triggers a PHP script to confirm that it's been read (or do other things). This can be quite effective. But this obviously relies on the recipient having an email client that can read HTML.
Or a recipient using a browser like Mozilla and having switched OFF the HTML-e-mail to stop spammers.....! I might be paranoid, but someone sending me an e-mail in HTML-format has no chance with me!

:twisted: :P
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