Comment by Joe Clark on "Email Tracking on aws/nodejs"

Joe Clark

Full-stack developer specializing in healthcare IT

Dec 10, 2016

Typical way to track emails is to use a 1x1 image. Something like this:

<img src="yourserver.com/tracker encoded way of identifying the recipient"/>

Your tracker would serve up a 1x1 .gif as the image. Tracking can then include all sorts of info since it's a server call. You can get date/time stamp it opened, possibly email or web client used, etc.

I used to work for an email service provider, and this is the way we, and our competitors did it. The only issue with this is that the end user has to turn on images. Of course, if you have links that they click on, they'd have to turn on images for that.

Of course, if you don't want to do this yourself, there are services out there that handle email sending and tracking. MailChimp, for example, has a free tier. And most have APIs where you can send directly from your application.

stuff ;)

Dec 10, 2016

that's an open tracking and he wanted a send tracking. :)

I kinda read more into the question than I should have, I suppose.

In that case, it depends on if you want to track that the API to send the email was called, or when SES actually physically sent the email. Those are two different things. Obviously, you could create some sort of log entry when you make the API call. With SES, you may not get the actual date/time the email was physically sent from their server, though. SES queues sends, though it's typically within a few seconds of the API call. If there's any delay, you wouldn't necessarily know that. All you would know is when you called their API, and at that point, you'd just log it somewhere. One way to address this is to get delivery receipt notification via Amazon SNS. There's a FAQ about delivery receipt notifications at https://aws.amazon.com/ses/faqs/

Search Hashnode