Following the documentation Google Analytics Email Tracking Measurement Protocol, I want to track the opening of an Email.
I added the tracking pixel, with all necessary parameters.
<img src="https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=event&ec=email&ea=open&..."/>
But, when I open a tracked email with Gmail, the event is fired two times!
Tracking pixel loaded twice - Google Chrome > DevTools > Network panel
Note:
It seems that the next times I open this email (already open before), the event is correctly sent once ;
If I open the email with my localhost client (I use the fake SMTP Mailtrap), the event is always sent once.
What do you think about it?
The Google Image Proxy (caching images) could be the cause?
(But I guess there would be a notice in the documentation...)
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I have a question about tracking email. I've made a server that tracks an email by the inserting the target URL into <img>.
Until now all is good, but if the user (the sender) opens the email, the server gets a GET Request from the Google image proxy. Now this is bad, because this tracking URL was targeting the recipients and not the sender.
I've thought of changing the URL in the sender's side like MailTrack.io does, but don't know how.
Use a mail client that doesn't preview the image. I believe what is happening is that your current mail client is previewing the email for you and tripping your tracking link. Another option would be to use a service like Mailchimp, which will add the tracking code for you. I also believe certain versions of outlook have this feature but I'm not sure how much mileage that will get you.
I had recently made an email tracking system for a friend of mine (we track emails by using image tracking pixels). It is working perfectly fine, except for two cases..(we track emails by using image tracking pixel)
1. If I send a mail with tracking on, and then I open the same mail from “sent item”, it will read the image and will appear as mail has been read since the image was loaded again. And as such even though the receipent hasn’t opened the mail, system will still show it as a read mail
2. How do I track my email incase of multiple recipients? I mean how will i be able to check who has opened and who hasn’t out of the lot. I tried researching over the net, but found only few companies are doing that. Form what I could gather, they were somehow sending unique tracking out to all the recipents. Somehow they are splitting the mails when sent form gmail.
I'm using App Engine to send text messages to users (by sending e-mails to their SMS/MMS gateways). The e-mails act essentially as push notifications for iPhone users (since Apple doesn't support Web Push at this time).
The plan is to allow users to also reply to those messages and tweak their subscription (for example, replying with "unsubscribe" would remove their subscription and stop sending them text messages without having to log in to the site and make changes in the "account" screen).
I am sending e-mails using a From: address of notification#XXXX.appspotmail.com, where XXXX is my App Engine project ID.
If I send an e-mail to an AT&T subscriber at NNNNNNNNNN#mms.att.net (or my personal e-mail addresss ZZZZZZ#gmail.com), the sender appears exactly as I originally sent it, and those users may reply to the message (and it is received by App Engine, since it is of the proper format for App Engine to proces it).
However, when App Engine sends an identical e-mail to NNNNNNNNNN#msg.fi.google.com, the sender (the address in the From: line) is always rewritten to be XXXX#appid.googleusercontent.com (where "XXXX" is the App Engine project ID). I don't have any access to the mail for that e-mail address, and it is not posted to App Engine.
When sending mail from App Engine, it adds the following MIME headers:
X-Google-Appengine-App-Id: s~XXXX
X-Google-Appengine-App-Id-Alias: XXXX
My guess is that there's something on the Project Fi MMS gateway that's doing some translation that it shouldn't be doing, using those headers.
I couldn't find any useful references to appid.googleusercontent.com online, so I thought that I'd post here.
I checked in with Project Fi's support, and this was not in their playbooks or documentation at all.
So, two questions:
Why are e-mails sent from App Engine to Project Fi having their From: address rewritten?
Is there anything that can be done to fix it?
I was implementing pixel tracking for a gmail web service, but since today google has changed the gmail client to proxy linked images !
Is there any work around, as the proxy is giving my server a fake/masked ip and location?
This is true. gmail has been proxying all user content via it thus showing Mountain View,CA as its REMOTE_ADDR. This is true only for gmail clients. The same logic has not been working on Gmail via outlook or any other mail client.
Most email tracking companies rely on these details to differentiate the recepients of the mail.
I dont think there is a work around. But if there is one we would find out soon given that these companies have a lot to lose.
Meanwhile, you could try using HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR or disposition notification headers. But given that this can be messed with, there isnt much option left but just go back to making people click on links!!!
In my experience as of Aug 5 2018 my emails sent with a tracking pixel are blocked by google. I uncheck the send tracking pixel box in my crm and the message arrives instantly. The tracked email never arrives.
I made a video to show but its exactly as I just described and quite boring to watch lol. BUt you get the point. Obviously this is just in my experience but it's too bad because knowing if my clients read it is only way know not to keep sending the same message in a different way assuming it went to spam.
Looks to me like they're caching, not just proxying.. I whipped up a PHP file to output a random image selected out of a collection of 5 images... It's the same image each time.. Testing against Yahoo! mail and outlook, both of which change each time the email is opened..
Basically we have an Astak Mole cam that can email images at regular intervals and we want to put the images in a folder and post it on the site.
Is there a way to use IFTTT.com
We can control the email address that receives the message and the server that will display the image.
Got any ideas?
I'm not sure about IFTTT.com but there are many ways to programatically get emails to a web server.
I wrote a blog post with the three main methods for programmatically accessing email. These are namely:
Setup an email server and have it run a script locally when an email arrives
Poll over POP3 or IMAP to an existing email mailbox and then download the messages
Use a third party (such as CloudMailin) that takes an email and forwards it as an HTTP Post to your website.
Any of these methods should allow you to do what you're asking, the option to choose is really about how much you need to scale or what you have available already.