Have you ever asked yourself whether your boss, coworkers or simply family read your e-mails? Good, now you can monitor your sent e-mails.
In actual fact, there are many ways of e-mail tracking. We all know the "read-receipt" model, in which you deliver an e-mail requesting the read confirmation. When any recipient reads your e-mail, they are asked by the programs, "Would you like to confirm you received this e-mail? " Than the recipient may choose "No", and we'll never get a confirmation. So it is the honor system, and often times there are cases in which everyone cannot trust the individual.
Other approaches have happen to be implemented by corporate e-mail techniques, such as IBM Domino. Recipients may not be asked to confirm your reception so confirmations are generally always sent 杙rovided that your e-mails are actually read-, even so it works only for corporate recipients not for external people.
The tracking system I may describe next is "hands-free" and works for pretty much every e-mail system. It is actually analogous to a package-delivery program 杦e ship a bundle, and the system presents us a number for tracking it. Before getting practical, let me point out that you're going to need a server 朾ut in case you certainly one, you can always use our already-developed model.
Let抯 assume we would wish to ask our boss for a rise 杢hat抯 a common case the place that the recipient cannot be honest. So the system generates an ID for the e-mail, and stores it during the server抯 database. When people send the e-mail, this ID is sent alongside it.
What is the reasoning behind? Well, the ID spots our e-mail. When all of our boss reads it, the ID is "passed" to your server. So the server provides the message, "The e-mail ship to the boss is becoming read. " From certainly, there, the server may proceed often, such as storing any date and time, together with our boss? IP street address. It can even notify us to your e-mail address and cell phone!
How is the ID "passed" to your server? When our person in charge reads our e-mail, we just saw that your e-mail needs to "call back" the server when using the ID. This is achieved through passing the ID while in the source of an look.
Going back to this basic HTML lessons, any image抯 src attribute specifies any image抯 address. So if we insert a perception in our e-mail, together with we let its base be ourdomain. com/ourlogo. gif, consequently our boss? e-mail clientele gets that image together with shows it to him or her. That is, the e-mail shopper "calls" our server at ourdomain. com and needs the image ourlogo. gif.
The trick is to use a special page on the server, which receives any ID, stores the monitored data and notifies all the sender, and finally sends back a graphic 杢his is achieved through server-side scripting, offered by frameworks just like Microsoft. NET. So we insert a good 1x1 hidden image with our e-mail, and let a source be ourdomain. com/ourpage. aspx? ID=0123. ourpage. aspx is certainly our special page, and ID=0123 identifies our e-mail ship to our boss.
The page contains the ID and checks it up against the database 杛ecall that that ID is stored in the database. Then it tweets the database, and notifies the sender of their particular e-mail. Furthermore, the page can usually get the recipient抯 IP street address, which can reveal the geographic location and lot's more details. And finally, any page sends back a good 1x1 transparent image, which happens to be shown to the radio.
This is a "hands-free" system given that the recipient is never asked to make sure that the e-mail抯 reception 杋n truth, he or she would not even realize the e-mail are being tracked. Thus, this system is accused of compromising consumers? privacy, and has caused the redesign of e-mail clientele and services 杦hich currently allow users to disable visuals on received e-mails.
For seeing this product in practice, please go to the SenderTracer Free Tools for http: //www. sendertracer. com.
Tue Sep 27, 2011 6:01 pm
