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PHP Email Snooper
Posted: Mon Feb 19, 2007 11:01 am
by lunny
Hi Guys,
I am developing an online tool for snoop detection, the tool would alarm users if there email was being viewed by someone else. Email traps would be used to get the details from the person watching your emails. The idea was to attach a link to this email which the snooper would visit and from that gather the his IP information and build a profile for our users.
Im just wondering if anyone here has experience with PHP and IP tracking and is it possible to justs send email with PHP scripts attached to track who is reading those emails.
Any help regarding this would be most appreciated.
Posted: Mon Feb 19, 2007 11:23 am
by Chris Corbyn
This is an interesting idea. You could actually modify the message at the MX server to inject a remote image which you're expecting to be there. Then you can use server-side code to track IPs your emails are being read from. Most mail clients will block remote images by default though since you can also phish for working email addresses using the same techniques at the time you send the mail. My idea is something (a pipe like spamassassin) you install on the receiving mail server, which isn't what you mean.
It's not possible to send PHP code or attach PHP code to an email. You can however stick a "honeypot" hyperlink in emails which tempts intruders to click it. That hyperlink can point to your server where you work out some IP details.
Posted: Mon Feb 19, 2007 11:29 am
by onion2k
d11wtq wrote:You can however stick a "honeypot" hyperlink in emails which tempts intruders to click it.
Or an image if it's an HTML email .. then you'll get their IP either immediately, or once they click "view images in this email". Rather more likely than them clicking a link.
Posted: Mon Feb 19, 2007 11:39 am
by Chris Corbyn
onion2k wrote:d11wtq wrote:You can however stick a "honeypot" hyperlink in emails which tempts intruders to click it.
Or an image if it's an HTML email .. then you'll get their IP either immediately, or once they click "view images in this email". Rather more likely than them clicking a link.
*cough*
Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 11:21 am
by lunny
Thanks for the reply, I especially like the image Idea.
Now my question is once i set up the honeypot link which links to a site on my server, how do i go about tracking the visitors IP address ?
Does PHP have functions for this ? Im not asking for the code just an outline how to go about this
Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 12:10 pm
by Chris Corbyn
It's all stored in a superglobal array $_SERVER.