The log will clearly show which email clients “enable” tracking and which don’t. To confirm this manually, we can send an email to any of these clients and monitor the log file of a web server (apache/nginx). To get back to the previous point, tracking the email is not supported by all email clients. Apple Combined: iPhone/iPad/Apple Mail (42%).Rough estimate of the current market share: The market share of email clients is surprisingly leaning towards Apple. Note: some email providers/clients can cache an image (for a month), so additional emails might not trigger the “webbeacon” fetch. To track some event (like a link click), you’ll have to add it in the content and adjust/create a new PHP file to process it. With this, you can track if email is opened or catch recipients IP address. The image will not be visible, but nonetheless the request will be triggered. When user receives that email, the email client will usually trigger the image request or in this case webbeacon.php. Next, pipe that content into the sendmail command: $ cat content.html | sendmail -t First, define the content of an email (HTML): From: Next, to send email, we can use system’s mail configuration and sendmail. To generate a single pixel gif/image web beacon in PHP ( webbeacon.php): We need to include a single pixel gif/image in the email via an image link, for e.g.: /webbeacon.php" Additionally, you can place a link within email (Start here, Follow up, etc) and trace users response rate or email campaign success rate (emails sent vs open emails vs click rate). In large email campaigns, to make a distinction between the users/emails, the loaded image name (or its parameters) usually contain some user related information (id, hash, etc). Opening an email will trigger image load from a remote server, which will consequently lead to “email open” detection and/or tracking of a recipient’s IP (in some cases). The image is often invisible, a single pixel gif (referred to as web beacon). Simplified, by placing an image into the email content (HTML), sender can track some of previously mentioned parameters (opened emails, clicked links, IPs, etc). Recipient’s IP tracking Email Tracking: How Email Gets Tracked Whether you’re trying to track someone or if you’re tracking some user’s actions and activity (maybe in an email campaign), methods are the same/similar.
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