smtp - Tracking email bounces, opens, clicks

Question

I found How do you make sure email you send programmatically is not automatically marked as spam? to (hopefully) be a solid guide to avoiding being marked as spam. Are there any other important tips/suggestions?

How do I track bounces,opens,clicks? These are features found in paid services like Mail Chimp and Campaign Monitor.

Answer 1

Do the same as Mail Chimp and Campaign Monitor then. LIE about your stats.

There is no accurate way to track emails. If there was it'd just get blocked again. Most people don't want you to know these things and most email software ensures you don't. The stats provided by email tracking services are bogus.

Consider:

• Most spam services will detect image 'bugs' and flag you as spam.
• Image bugs don't do anything until the user clicks 'show images'. This does not mean they didn't open or read it without images. How can you tell if a mail service downloaded the image preemptively to cache it or check it for image spam?
• It can be difficult to determine the difference between a bounce and a reply due to differences in mail servers.

Only clicks can be tracked by redirecting through your server. Even then who can say that mail services won't start processing links in emails to determine whether the email is spam?