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..
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I want to track when emails are opened in gMail and display it somewhere.
I don't want to use third party mail service.
I need to track this with something else while using Gmail API.
A colleague said there is a tool like Shiftmail or something.
Do you know any tool to track email sent via Gmail API?
Do you know any tool to track email sent via Gmail API?
AFAIK, Official Gmail Blog have announced about an exciting change to how Gmail works wherein email providers track opens by inserting a small image–unique to each subscriber–into the email. When that image is loaded, we know the email has been opened.
Please check Open tracking in Gmail is now more accurate for more information regarding this change.
On the other hand, you may want to also check and see if Postmark - Tracking opens helps. Sending emails with open tracking enabled will embed an invisible pixel into your emails that allows Postmark to record information when the email is viewed. Please note, however, of the given limitations on the use of Postmark.
Is there an API to take advantage of Gmail's pixel caching?
I'm quite not sure if this is what you're looking for, but you may want to also check Tracking Pixel API. As mentioned,
Google Mail caches images which can cause your pixel to be cached and not fire on email open! To get around this, add a no-cache header to your emails and you should be good to go!
I am sending our HTML newsletters with an image on each email that help us know if a person actually received that newsletter.
I just add in the HTML body of the email a img tag like that:
<img src="https://www.example.com/read/BASE64URLENCODED_DATA" />
BASE64URLENCODED_DATA is something that I can read on server when the request arrives to know the email address that downloaded that image. We receive the request to download that fake image, we save the data and return some headers to show a transparent image of 1x1 px.
The problem is that usually this works for no more than the 10% of the total emails sent on each newsletter. This means that most of the email clients that receive our newsletter don't permit the downloading of images (showing the classic message "If you want to download attached images click here...").
Is there any way to force an email client to make a remote request like that?
We need to produce more realistic statistics for our newsletters but we can't find a way to force this remote requests or fake images download.
Thank you.
A longer answer - there may be ways how you can trick some e-mail clients, but this will work only on a particular client. There are lots of different clients out there. Maybe you find a way of tricking Oultook, but no guarantee that it works for Google Mail or other web mail service. Then there is Roundcube, Squirrelmail, Horde and other web clients. Then the mobile devices come in - iPhone/iPad mail client, Android mail clients, Outlook mobile.. No, you don't want to do this.
And even if you find a way of tricking all those programs (which I highly doubt), most likely your message will be malformatted and most spam filters will catch it as spam.
Ok, I've been working with this Magento 1.7.0.2 website:
http://www.kharmakhare.com
There are two forms currently on the website. If I change either form to any kharmakhare.com email address, the email is never received. If I change either form to my email address, I get the email just fine.
Yes, I HAVE checked spam. The Kharma Khare email address will not receive emails from Magento. I thought it had to do with the Google Apps not being installed correctly... except when I logged into the email there were already tons of emails in there.
They don't have any problem receiving emails, they just don't receive any emails from the website. I've searched online for an answer. All I can find is problems sending emails through Google Apps, not receiving them.
My client already did set up the SPF records as well. In addition, last time I was in Google Apps (at least a year ago) it looked completely different, so I don't know where anything is anymore.
The first form is on the contact page (this uses Magento's default contact module):
http://www.kharmakhare.com/contact-us
The other is opened by clicking on the "Free Sample" tab on the upper right side of the screen. After spending hours working on this over a couple days I finally figured out how to do what would've been a 10-minute job in wordpress; creating an alternate email form. -_-
Regardless, although I know both forms work, neither one will send to the email address it actually needs to get sent to, and its driving me nuts. Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this problem?
Switch off the mailserver for that domain.
The reason they are not getting the emails and you are is that the sending address is something#kharmakhare.com and the receiving address is somethingelse#kharmakhare.com. The MX records offloading the email to Google Apps are not used in this instance as the server will look for the local mailserver first.
Hiii
how can we track the status of email sent from drupal. I want to know all the email sent from my site is delivered to client mail or not. I delivered also want to know it is read or not.
Is it posssible. if possible how can we do this...
One option is to send the email in HTML format and include a small (1px square) transparent gif, served from a PHP script on your server, with the unique id of the email appended as a GET parameter in the gif's URL. Your script can then log which emails have been opened using drupal's watchdog() function or whatever.
This is not foolproof of course, as some people's mail clients automatically refuse to download images (in order to prevent this sort of tracking by spammers) or will open HTML email in plaintext mode e.g. mobile clients. However, this could still be useful to you, depending on your situation.
The CiviCRM Drupal module provides this functionality as it's focused on political campaigning and read tracking is potentially helpful even if it's not perfect, but you'd have to use the CiviMail component to send the messages if you want to use this (it also tracks bounces, so not a bad solution).
You can't. Once it's been handed over to the mailer daemon you have no control over it any more.
There are ways of seeing if the message was received, but none of them are reliable. You can request a receipt, but the user is under no obligation to send one, and they may by annoyed by the request. You could embed a web bug (a link to an image that actually runs a script to log the fact the mail was received), but they are easily blocked and you could only use them with HTML mail anyway.
This specific example is using AT&T as the carrier of the receiver.
When sending SMS messages to clients via their carrier email address (1234567890#txt.att.net) from a static email address, the messages arrive on the phone from a number in the format of 1 (400) 000-244. Every time a new SMS message is sent, that number changes slightly. This causes phones, such as the iPhone, from properly threading the SMS messages that are coming from the same source email address.
Basic research shows that this has something to do with how AT&T's gateway handles turning emails into SMS messages. We've also looked at and decided that Common Short Codes (CSC) are not worth $1000 per month to purchase, so this is not an option for us.
Does anyone know of another way around this limitation in which it would be possible to force all SMS messages from the same source email to appear that way on the phone so that they are threaded correctly?
In our configuration, the emails are going out via SMTP using the PHP PEAR Mail_Mime package. We're really looking for a way we can do it on our end without the purchase of a shared or dedicated CSC.
Use:
<10 digit phone number>#mms.att.net
Instead of 'txt.att.net'
This will solve the short code dilemma.
For your AT&T issue they use a cluster model to send out SMS using the email gateway. To over come your problem there might be a couple of solutions but it all depends on what your needs are looks like they increment the phone number by one for each new message. Not sure how you could thread these.
Zeep Mobile lets you send SMS with a shared Short Code but they tag the end of your SMS message with ads, but the service is free (limited text per month I think)
Twilio might be a good cheap alternative as they offer such services. No short code but I believe they use the same From number for your threading issue.
Using your own GSM Modem could be an option but there is some work on getting this to work properly. Also it uses a Long Code (Think telephone number) instead of a Short Code.
There are a couple of other solutions so I will update my answer soon.
UPDATE:
Tropo
Google Voice