3

Is there a way to check if a sent e-mail has been marked as spam or deleted?

I work with Rails 3.

Shog9
  • 156,901
  • 35
  • 231
  • 235
nothing-special-here
  • 11,230
  • 13
  • 64
  • 94
  • 1
    See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/371/how-do-you-make-sure-email-you-send-programmatically-is-not-automatically-marked – Shog9 Aug 24 '11 at 06:13

1 Answers1

7

No, there isn't. After your mail has been sent to your receiver's SMTP server, there's no way to track it down anymore.

I know what you're thinking: how can some mail-clients track down wether an email has been read or not (e.g. in Outlook). They can do this by adding a little img-tag to their mails (html). When a user opens the mail, it'll open the path specified in the img's src-attribute. Since that's a script (like PHP or something), it can automatically sets a flag to 'seen' when a mail has been opened.

Of course, there are some other ways to track this down, but I think this is the most popular one.

However, this can't be done to check whether a mail has been rejected, deleted or moved to the spam-folder.

cutsoy
  • 10,127
  • 4
  • 40
  • 57
  • 2
    It bears pointing out that the approach described here doesn't work very well. It's not very prone to false positives (if the tracking URL gets a visit, you can be reasonably sure that the message was delivered, albeit some spam-blocking systems also visit URLs automatically) but if there is no hit, you simply do not know if the message was blocked, or if the recipient reads emails in a client which doesn't automatically fetch remote images. – tripleee Aug 24 '11 at 06:44