Django/Python — How to Track Email Open Rates

Hola!

I just finished some email tracking software, and I’m going to explain very quickly how it works.

My newsletter sender appends a specific image to the end of the email, with a specific get request that identifies the recipient.

Lets say I have a subscriber model, full of emails. I send the email: “Hello”

subscriber = Subscriber(email='yuji@anuvawines.com', name='Yuji Tomita')
subject = 'testing open tracking'
body = "hello'
new_body = body + '<img src="/open-tracking/?id=%s" />' % (subscriber.id) 
send_html_mail(subject, new_body, "from@anuvawines.com", [subscriber.email])

This sends an email with an image embedded that identifies the subscriber.

Now, for the view to handle the image request. It must return a valid image or else your html email will often have a broken image icon. Here’s how to pass back an image in django:

def track-open-emails(request):
     if 'id' in request.GET:
        #do something with the id, which tells you that specific subscriber has opened the email.
     #do something to record that an email has been opened.
     image_data = open("/path_to_image/", 'rb').read()
     return http.HttpResponse(image_data, mimetype="image/png")

done!

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