Determine if an image has been downloaded from web server

[mudogg80]

I am creating an html email and I'm going to eventually determine the open rate of the mass emailing...but first how do I determine if an image within the email has been downloaded from the web server?

Thanks.

[stapel]

I think you'd have to look through your logfiles for image calls that came from e-mails. Sound tedious....

Eliz.

[mudogg80]

Really? I thought there might be an easier way similar to adding a reference number into a link that the user clicks (http://www.example.com/?referenceNumber=22948). I insert this reference to the link into my database for stats on the html email.

Here is other information:
I currently have an html email that accesses images located at http://www.example.com/images/theimage.gif

So there is no other way to do this without parsing log files?

Thanks for your help!

[LifeinAsia]

If you have some sort of application server (Cold Fusion, PHP, etc.) running, you can dynamically grab the image, Ex: <img src="www.example.com/emailgraphic.php">

In the emailgraphic.php template you log the call to a database then server the image.

A better implementation would be to include the recipient's e-mail address and log that- ex: <img src="www.example.com/emailgraphic.php?email=[e-mail]"> Then you'll have a log of all the people who actually opened the message. Otherwise, if you sent out 100 e-mails and got 20 hits, you won't know if that means 20% of the recipeints opened the message once, or 10% opened the message twice, or...

[Duskrider]

Sure, you could do that.

Direct them to a page that houses a logging script. You can then log it however you want... database, flat file, whatever. Depending on how you want to track things, you could make the link do basically anything you want.
(I'll use a php example as that's what I'm familiar with)

http://www.example.com/viewimage.php?id=example.gif

Then when the link gets clicked on, the page can track the fact that a user requested example.gif and then serve them the requested image. So long as all your file references are handled correctly, you could change the variable to be whatever image you want people to view... the script should track it when it's served.

[LifeinAsia]

Don't rely on someone clicking on a link- that won't give you the real number of people who open the file.

Stick with my example- you'll get a log of each time the graphic was downloaded (i.e., each time the message was opened, assuming the recipients have their e-mail clients set for HTML formatting).