From: Walton Hoops <walton@...>
Date: 2010-04-23T06:01:32+09:00
Subject: Re: HOW TO Track How Many Recipients Open Your Mail IN RAILS

On 4/22/2010 8:38 AM, Kevin Hopkins wrote:
> Email tracking can be done with a fair amount of accuracy but it is a pain
> to implement.  The basic theory is that you can embed a 1px by 1px image in
> your emails that must be downloaded from your server.  When the user loads
> the email, as long as they allow it to request images from external servers,
> the image will be linked with a unique query string that when the image is
> requested, is passed via the url to your rails controller.  This unique
> identifier can be matched via your models to the specific user that has that
> token associated with their account.  Once checking with the model, checking
> out what email user made the request, the controller then rather than
> rendering html or partial actually returns an image back to the user request
> and as far as they know, most users wont be able to tell the difference.
>
> this is not 100% accurate though and will take time to implement.  There
> arent any plugins or gems that I know of being available that handle this.
> Maybe I'm wrong and someone else will know though
>
> --Kevin
>
> This is really the most accurate way but takes alot of jumping through hoops
> to get it to work.
>   
It also doesn't work if the users client blocks remote content (most do).