Book Image

phpList 2 E-mail Campaign Manager

Book Image

phpList 2 E-mail Campaign Manager

Overview of this book

Tired of an e-mail BCC list that scrolls off the page, or fiddly and hard-to-manage bulk mailing systems? You need phpList – a high-powered, robust, feature-packed mailing system that will get out of your way and get the job done! You want to know more about phpList? phpList is a popular open source e-mail campaign manager, sporting a powerful web frontend, rich message editor, and an advanced feature set. phpList 2 E-mail Campaign Manager will guide you from basic installation and setup through management, reporting, and automation of phpList, the world's most popular open source e-mail campaign manager. It also covers advanced customization and configuration of phpList. We start with a basic configuration, and finish with a full-featured e-mail management engine. You will work your way up from basic installation to advanced topics such as bounce automation, user and click-through tracking, and integration with third-party tools such as WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, and Blogger. Advanced topics such as securing your installation against spammers, attacks, and vulnerabilities are covered, as well as additional advanced and experimental features offered by phpList. This book is an invaluable guide for any e-mail publisher who wants a robust and powerful engine to manage their small-to-huge e-mail distribution empire.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
phpList 2 E-mail Campaign Manager
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

User tracking


User tracking can be used to tell whether a unique recipient of an HTML-formatted message has opened the message in their e-mail client. phpList tracks user activity by embedding a tiny (1 x 1 pixel) transparent image into each HTML-formatted e-mail that it sends. This image, instead of being an actual image file, is a unique URL to a phpList script, whose function when loaded is to record a "hit" in a database table against a unique message ID.

phpList can then examine that database table to tell which messages destined for which users have been opened.

The embedding tracking image will look something like this in the source of your HTML message:

<img src="http://url-to-your-phplist-install.com/ut.php?u=1a555c58f885bf66ec8571d217eea18d&m=26" width="1" height="1" border="0">

As this technique relies on the e-mail being displayed in HTML, it won't work on users who receive your messages in plain text format.

This common technique for e-mail opening tracking suffers...