Verifying Email Delivery

Web Bugs no longer work

[elklabone]

I know "web bugs" were a security concern for many, but adding a unique image identifier to html emails was an easy way to "verify" that they were delivered. If you don't know what I'm talking about, in our emails to our clients we used to send out html emails with images including a 1x1 pixel image like this:

<img src ="http://somesite.com/img.php?234432"> where the string was a unique identifier.. this would run a short script and insert into a db that the customer had received and opened the email we sent.

Again, a security concern for some, but in business sometimes it's important to make sure mail is delivered and read. Kind of like "delivery confirmation" at the post office.

Most mail services block images from html messages now (I assume because of web bugs?). Any way to "confirm delivery" of email messages?

--Mark

[Adrian2k4]

Since the WinXP SP2 webcontent isn't shown anymore for security/antispam reasons.
If you really really really NEED the verification (I personnaly don't think it's nessessary) the only way I can think of is to get the user to allow the webcontent to be shown in emails.
So how do you get the user to do this.... you could send the email as a fancy HTML email which is only readable without ristrictions if you have the webcontent enabled.
This is a very bad practice to send email, as you need to view it in HTML, bandwidth usage is higher, the email isn't nessesseraly offline-viewalbe etc.
AND there are still people out there that prefer text/plain emails....