[English Breakfast Tea]

Is it possibe to check if an email has been opened or not with a web hook?

A web hook is an integration method provided by an API so that when a certain action is detected a trigger is made to execute

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Thanks

[Catacaustic]

Not really. The industry-standard way is to embed a 1x1 pixel tracking image into the HTML version of the message. That only tracks opens when users view HTML emails and allow images. You can also track opens by tracking clicks on links if you use tracking URL's instead of standard URL's, but this can cause users to worry about where the links are leading to as they are pretty anomolised. Anything else doesn't get tracked, and can't be tracked.

[Northie]

what Catacaustic said is correct

However, I'm interested in your context of 'Web hook's...these are generally 'events' spawned by your app code to which an event 'listener' listens for and executes some other code....think javascript onclick methods but for PHP (sure, you can't have an on click event in php but it may be 'coreModule_A_constructFired' or anything else).

some Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs, eg postfix) allow similar things, often called milters (mail filters) but these are for pre-delivery things like adding dkim header records and antivirus checks. Ie - not for tracking openings

[Hammer65]

I've used the image method for tracking when an e-mail newsletter was opened. In situations like that it can be reasonably reliable because the people who receive the e-mail know what it is and open it specifically to see the content. However if the e-mail client has images turned off it won't load the images and that kind of tracking won't work.

[Northie]

if you run your own mail server and have access to the logs then you can interrogate the log files to find a status message.

4xx are soft bounces (eg mailbox full, try again later)
5xx are hard bounces (eg mailbox does not exist, you're blacklisted)
200 is successfull.

With postfix I am able to get the 'Sent' status and I also get the remote server's message queue ID.

However, just because the recipient's server accepted the email does not mean that it will get to the inbox or even be opened.

Expect a 1% open rate, and then 1 - 10% (of the opens) to click. So if you're lucky you'll see a CTR of 0.1%

Email marketing is along the lines of throw enough **** and some of it will stick.

However, you can continue to add addresses to your list, then cleanse your list(s) by trashing anyone who doesn't open or click within 3 different mailings. We often find ourselves buying about 1 - 2 million email addresses, from which we can glean upto 50k ( ~2%).