Track php emails with php script?

Question

I am sending email newsletters using php mail() function.

I have to track the newsletter emails status.

The status would be
1. Num.Of Sent.
2. Num.Of Delivered.
3. Delivered date.
4. Total Num.Of Read.
5. Unique Num.Of Read.
6. Read date.
7. Num.Of Bounced.
8. Total Num.Of users clicked the links in the email.
9. Unique Num.Of users clicked the links in the email.

From the above status i could track the following:
1. Is Sent. // This is tracked as it is sent from coding.
8. Total Num.Of clicked the links in the email. // This is tracked by adding additional parameters in url.
9. Unique Num.Of clicked the links in the email. // This is tracked by adding additional parameters in url.

How to track the other status of the emails sent from mail() function?
I have to send and track emails from same server.

Answer 1

You can't directly track the other status from the mail() function. Technically Is Sent only tells you that the mail was passed over to the server's outbound mail queue successfully - you can't actually tell if it left your server.

1,. You will need to check your mail server logs to see exactly when the email left the server.

2,3. Num of delivered and delivered date - again you would need to check your mail server logs to see when the mail was handed over (successfully) to a third party mail server. However it would depend on your definition of delivered (into the end-users mailbox? Into their email client?) as to how reliable these stats would be.

4,5,6. Total number read, unique number read, read date. You can't accurately track this. However if you sent HTML email you could embed an image into the email whereby the source of the image was your webserver. If each image URL had a unique identifier for the person you sent the email to then you could track this from your server logs (or via php if the url was a php script that returned an image). However this relies on the end user allowing the loading of images from external webservers (Outlook and gmail for example have this turned off by default).

7,. If you sent the from address to be a script on your server it could parse the bounce message and determine how many bounced. Alternatively you can just have the from address be a mailbox that you go into and check manually.

8, 9. Each link in the email would need to be a link to a url on your webserver. That URL could be a script that would track who clicked (by the use of a query variable) and what they want to see (another query variable) and then redirect them (header function in php) to where you want them to end up.