Forum: Ruby on Rails Mail statistics

maybe this forum is not the ideal place for this question, but does
anyone know how to track email statistics? such as clicks, delete,
spam report.

On Mar 5, 2012, at 7:37 AM, Marcelo G. Silva wrote:

> maybe this forum is not the ideal place for this question, but does
> anyone know how to track email statistics? such as clicks, delete,
> spam report.
>

Whenever I have ever wanted to do anything even a little bit more 
adventurous than password recovery messages from Devise, I always use a 
third-party service like Mailchimp or MyEmma. They have the entire 
business down to a science, and they sweat the details day-to-day to 
remain a non-spam sender. It's very much a full-time job that I'm happy 
to pay someone else to do. And they have all those "who opened it" 
trackers baked in.

Walter

the problem is that I need to create this type of service, like the
MailChimp.

On Mar 5, 2012, at 3:54 PM, Marcelo G. Silva wrote:

>  the problem is that I need to create this type of service, like the
> MailChimp.

Then you're going to have to solve the same problems they have.

The usual way to figure out if someone has opened a mail message is to 
add a "beacon" image to it. You add a 1x1px image in the body of the 
e-mail message linked from your server, and use the path to that image 
to convey a code. <img 
src="http://example.com/tracker/asdfs78223/pixel.gif" /> Another spin on 
this is to add the token to each regular image in your layout. You make 
up these tokens when you send out the message, so you know that 
asdfs78223 == joebob@foo.com.

Back in Rails, you create a route for this image, and serve the image 
but also record the request in your database.

Walter

On 5 March 2012 21:16, Walter Lee Davis <waltd@wdstudio.com> wrote:
> Back in Rails, you create a route for this image, and serve the image but also 
record the request in your database.
And in practice of course it doesn't work very well as a lot of people
have their mailer set to not automatically show images.  In fact I
think everyone who realises that they /can/ set their mailer up like
that does, for precisely the reason that we don't want people snooping
on us.

Colin

On Mar 5, 2012, at 4:20 PM, Colin Law wrote:

>>
>> Back in Rails, you create a route for this image, and serve the image but also 
record the request in your database.
>
> And in practice of course it doesn't work very well as a lot of people
> have their mailer set to not automatically show images.  In fact I
> think everyone who realises that they /can/ set their mailer up like
> that does, for precisely the reason that we don't want people snooping
> on us.
>
> Colin

That goes without saying for the class of users who know where the 
preferences are and change the from the defaults. I'm certainly in that 
camp myself. But the vast majority of people who don't ever change these 
defaults do get tracked this way, despite my efforts to educate them.

Walter

On 5 March 2012 21:29, Walter Lee Davis <waltd@wdstudio.com> wrote:
>>> Then you're going to have to solve the same problems they have.
>>
>> Colin
>
> That goes without saying for the class of users who know where the preferences 
are and change the from the defaults. I'm certainly in that camp myself. But the 
vast majority of people who don't ever change these defaults do get tracked this 
way, despite my efforts to educate them.

Is not the default in gmail and thunderbird to not show images?  I may
be wrong.  No doubt the default in Outlook is to show everything under
the sun and ignore security issues.

Colin