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We have a special tracking code that figures it out over the email clients' use of HTTP and with some fancy server-side node/mongodb stuff.

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Maybe a throttled node.js response on an img on a large image file? edit: Oops I see that staunch beat me to it.

It's still bullshit. Most email clients don't display images by default. The notion that email reading behavior can be tracked with anything resembling reliability is a blatant lie.

Bullshit. There's not a single major client that executes code from emails.

You might be able to have some <img> link back to your server, but even those are blocked by default.

Are images blocked on hotmail, yahoo, etc. too now? I've only used gmail for the past 5+ years.

Either way though, it wouldn't really produce a random sample, though maybe it would allow somewhat meaningful comparisons between separate email campaigns even if the absolute numbers aren't too meaningful.

Yeah, all of them block images for emails that come from new contacts.

They aren't blocked by default in all clients. Check your mom's iPhone, it loads images by default.

If that's true, it's very dangerous. Imagine somebody finds an iphone image vulnerability, a virus based on it will spread across the whole world in a couple of hours.

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