I'm wondering if it's possible, through perhaps pixel tracking or another means, to know an email recipient's IP address to provide location-based dynamic content?
The most reliable way would likely be to embed a tiny image in the header that links to one of your servers. Then when the open the image you can get their ip address based on where it was accessed.
Pixel tracking is easy,
but you mentioned "dynamic content".
This means you need to make your email content change after the recipients open their email, which can only be achieved by javascript.
As far as I know, some email clients will block javascript execution, see here.
If you can use the first mail to record user's ip address, and store in database, you can use the information in the second mail.
Or you can provide a link in your email content, which leads the user to a dynamic webpage.
#Aviator provided a nice solution of generating dynamic image to solve the problem.
Related
If I have a temporary email address that hides a real address, would it be possible for someone to find out the real address?
One possible way I can think of could be tracking a read receipt by sending over a pixel by pixel image and tracking the email address that loads it.
Are there any other ways or would this be pretty good at hiding the address from spammers?
No, you usually can't identify the "real address" behind a temporary one, unless the recipient replies to your message using its real email address (whether it's a manual response, or an automatic one like a read receipt).
That's especially true when your temporary email address is provided by a disposable email provider. However, if your temporary address is indeed an alias on the same email server as the real address, the SMTP VRFY command may be used to resolve an alias to its real email address. But that SMTP feature is disabled on most email server, for obvious security reasons.
As CBroe pointed out, including an image or a link in your email wouldn't help you finding the real email address. Because mail content would be HTML, displayed by the brower, and not at all related to the email context. At most, it would tell you that the email was received and its content scanned. That's not even a guarantee that a human opened it, since some antispam filters resolve URLs to ensure they're not a threat.
i have an idea about system where users respond to website's messages using the emails they received.
Is it even possible to have multiple imaginary emails with hash in the e-mail's name field(f.e., 1h2149g0as1gasd9123#mysite.com ) and those all imaginary e-mails just forward content to messaging#mysite.com e-mail. And afterwards we are able to parse the contents and know for which conversation the message was sent.
The emails are hosted in Google service. Could not find any information about this in internet.
Such option would be excellent, because there would be no need of including the identificator in e-mail's content which might be deleted if no quoted text is in replied e-mail.
I'm open to any other suggestions that would fit in this situation.
When using Google's service, you can add tags after the e-mail address using a +. For example...
test#domain.com
test+12345#domain.com
test+wuishw78#domain.com
will all go through to test#domain.com, and you can then look at the address.
Note this is not supported by all e-mail systems, so while this works on Google's hosted e-mail, it may not work on others.
I yet read some posts on the argument, but I'd like to know if there are some "new" best practice to follow to avoid email clients (thunderbird, Outlook, gmail, ect) block remote images in a html email.
Of corse images in the email have alt description; but there is a way to be considered a secure host to which download images?
Thanks
The biggest thing that affects whether your image will load or not is user interaction. If the user has added you to their address book, responded to your email, sent replies back to you or clicked on links, the email client will add you to the white list and ensure that your emails will be delivered, rendered and isn't spam.
The best thing you can do is send engaging content and give the users a reason to interact with your email.
There are also services out there, like Return Path's Email Certification that will cost you quite a bit of money but ensure much better deliverability to their partner email providers.
I'd like to send an email message that contains multiple translations. The correct translation should be displayed according to the recipient's language preferences. Possible?
There is nothing in the email message format that will let you do that. What you can do instead, is to put translated contents as attachments, or post some (translated) links to your website, that will refer recipients to translated contents.
Anyway, I think it is best to store language preferences in the user profile (provided you have one) and use this information for customizing emails. That works well, unless you are sending messages to group of people...
To the best of my knowledge, email accounts are protected from getting any information about the recipients unless they provide it. Even email clients often prevent emails from displaying pictures, since it reveals the recipient's IP address. So I also think, it's unlikely to be possible.
I agree with the idea of Pawel Dyda.
I am looking for a way to attach an image with shipped confirmation email in Magento. There are few threads on pdf attachments but in my case I want to attach an image from 'media' folder with the email. Any idea how to do this?
Don't. Attachments drop your deliverability numbers.
Simply setup your email as html and use an img src to a file located on any publicly available server. No attachment required.
Quick question: is the image the same every time or specific to a customer order? I presume it is different or you wouldn't be asking.
To clarify: attachments are okay if you sending out invoices/delivery notes/order confirmation. However you are advised to setup your email so that the IP address can be verified directly. You are also advised to use a SPFrecord in your DNS so that the remote mail server can check that your server is allowed to send emails for you. Furthermore, in your order success page you can also ask your customers to add you to their address book, in that way your emails will not be marked as SPAM, regardless of whether you have SPF records and things setup. The only thing is you cannot guarantee customers will do that, so the SPF records and the IP reverse lookup is best. You can also use DomainKeys DKIM for the likes of Yahoo mail - mail delivery isn't what this question is about so you will have to Google DKIM for yourself...
Otherwise, attaching an image is simple. See the example at the top of the page of the Zend Programmers Reference Guide on attachments:
http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.mail.attachments.html
Keep reading the comments for clarification on how to get the image data included.
Hope that helps!