1

I've been working on open tracking by attaching tracking pixel to an email which is sent via PHP web application that I've been developing. The first problem I encountered was marking email as open just it was sent. I found help here: False open trackings using SES and gmail where I found link to the article describing how to prevent triggering opens by Google bot by checking user agent. I created the following function to check if I deal with the bot:

function isGoogleBot(string $userAgent): bool
{
    $googleBotUserAgent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.246 Mozilla/5.0';

    return $userAgent === $googleBotUserAgent;
}

I also read some articles about caching images by Gmail but unfortunately I'm still dealing with some problems.

I did the following test in Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari:

  1. I sent an email via application that I've been working on and then opened it in Gmail web client.
  2. Then I went to the application to see open tracking statistics.
  3. I repeated above test twice to make sure every time I get the same result.
  4. With the last email I checked what is happening with subsequent opens of the same email.

Here are my observations:

  • In every browser except Firefox when I open email for the first time an extra open is being made so I see 2 opens in the statistics. In Firefox only 1 open is numbered.

  • On subsequent opens only 1 open is being added to the total opens
    statistics every time I open the email. The exception is also Firefox where total opens counter is not changing. No matter how many times I open the email the total opens count is equal 1.

Is there any solution how to make reliable open tracking in every browser when email is opened in Gmail?

Szymon Czembor
  • 11
  • 3

0 Answers0