0007683: Message tracking feature seems to inhibit receiving html messages in Hotmail accounts

Notes
(0017945) michiel (administrator) 05-09-06 02:33	these kind of things are hard to debug, and probably even worse to find a way to fix it. But I'll have a look at systems I use and see whether it's the same. Some of them with 80k users have easily 25% hotmail, so that would be quite disastrous.

(0017946) michiel (administrator) 05-09-06 02:37	hmm, just did a quick check and a message that has 14k+ "views" has already on the first page quite a few hotmail users. The views are based on the "tracker" so not only does the tracker work, the message actually arrived, otherwise it would not have been a hit. So, the question is, what is the problem then?

(0017947) h2b2 (reporter) 05-09-06 03:40	I haven't a clue what could be the cause. As far as I can tell, no one else has reported this problem on the forum.

(0019138) mp459 (reporter) 24-09-06 18:46	I don't know if this is related, but I've a similar issue. See forum http://forums.phplist.com/viewtopic.php?t=6482 [^]

(0022109) h2b2 (reporter) 18-12-06 19:48	When running a test with the [USERTRACK] placeholder, I noticed the link to the tracker image is modified -probably by the outgoing mailserver (i.e. Mailscanner)- to this: <img src="MailScannerWebBug" width="1" height="1" alt="Web Bug from http://www.mydomain.com/lists/ut.php?u=4f9cf3f7884....&m=32" [^] /> It is possible that Hotmail's incoming mail scanner reacts to this "MailScannerWebBug" string and sends the message to oblivion. This is just an assumption for the moment, as I haven't had the time to check this. But, if confirmed, this might explain the issue reported by guyguylou. The "MailScannerWebBug" issue has previously been reported on the internet, e.g.: http://forum.ev1servers.net/showthread.php?t=54003 [^] https://www.activecampaign.com/support/tt/index.php?action=kb&article=251 [^] http://www.archivesat.com/MailScanner_discussion/thread640042.htm [^] One article suggests this fix, provided you manage your own server: SSH as root #pico -w /etc/MailScanner/MailScanner.conf search for the line: "Allow Webbugs" and put the value in yes Allow Webbugs = yes save it and restart MailScaner #service MailScanner restart

(0022154) hola (reporter) 21-12-06 08:42	could it be the width and height being detected? emaillabs does not add the width and height to thei web beacon

(0022168) michiel (administrator) 22-12-06 23:20	you could try that by hacking it out. Alternatively we can go even further, make it width=large height=large but in a hidden div or something.

(0047672) h2b2 (reporter) 22-05-08 07:11	bzcoder made some interesting suggestions in this forum post: http://forums.phplist.com/viewtopic.php?p=47405#47405 [^] =====START QUOTE===== Open tracking: instead of embedding a spacer image, which is stripped by many email services, add the option to set class="track" to an image tag. That image will then be converted to a tracking image. Advanced open tracking: option to enable htaccess/mod rewrite to create custom urls to avoid issues of email providers caching the tracking image(so instead of http://www.mydomain.com/images/tracking.png?uid=something [^] a better url is http://www.mydomain.com/images/tracking/uid.png [^] which mod rewrite converts back to the correct url) Embedding image options: class="embed" or class="noembed" to indicate images which should be sent with the email as opposed to images to be loaded from the server. Advanced image embedding option: class="embed2k" where 2 can be replaced with any number, so only small images are embedded while large ones are loaded from the site. This can be used to send spacers and small icons that provide positioning so they will be displayed, wheras the bigger images load off the site. Clicktracking: class="track" or class="notrack" to flag url links that should be tracked or not tracked. =====END QUOTE=====

(0047692) michiel (administrator) 22-05-08 11:18	that's indeed interesting. I've been thinking along that line as well, and we'll include it in future devs.