Any way to limit email views?

the gaffled · 11-05-2009, 12:08 PM

My partners and I own a membership site that emails out confidential information every morning. It has come to our attention that people are most likely forwarding the emails to their friends. Is there any way to limit the number of views of an email? One of our partner got a happy birthday coupon for a free burger, and the coupon shows up as a blank box once the email is opened twice.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be great! We are considering a secure login page on our site, but we are concerned that hundreds of people trying to access the site all at 7:30 to 7:45 am might impact availability of our site. We are using fatcow.com and we seem to have problems without a large rush all at once....

jwlnewsome · 11-05-2009, 01:54 PM

hi,
sounds like the source code for the coupon was linked to a backend script that checked it against the ip address. When the email is opened the image only appears once, then is disabled for that ip, as for forwarding the email on the only way i can think of is attaching a different tracking image to each email, then you could check to see if the email is being opened from different ip's and disable any coupons.
may need a good coder for that.

gordi555 · 11-12-2009, 10:27 AM

Yeah maybe it could log a maximum of 2 IP address, if exceeds the rendering script returns a blackedout picture displaying a warning.

To get this working you need to setup a script that you feed an email address to to determine what info is returned. Then from the HTML you put this script (example, process.php?e=test@test.com) as the SRC of the image. The email will then ping the SRC of the image tag, query your script, then return an image output. Don't worry about passing the IP address along as the script will detect it.

Once this is in place you can see who the offending emails are and also how many different IPs get logged.

Might sound complex but not really. Done it a few times.

11-05-2009, 12:08 PM	#1
the gaffled Warrior Member Join Date: Mar 2009 Posts: 3 Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts	Any way to limit email views? My partners and I own a membership site that emails out confidential information every morning. It has come to our attention that people are most likely forwarding the emails to their friends. Is there any way to limit the number of views of an email? One of our partner got a happy birthday coupon for a free burger, and the coupon shows up as a blank box once the email is opened twice. Any thoughts or suggestions would be great! We are considering a secure login page on our site, but we are concerned that hundreds of people trying to access the site all at 7:30 to 7:45 am might impact availability of our site. We are using fatcow.com and we seem to have problems without a large rush all at once....

11-05-2009, 01:54 PM	#2
jwlnewsome Active Warrior War Room Member Join Date: Nov 2009 Location: UK Posts: 51 Thanks: 0 Thanked 7 Times in 7 Posts	Re: Any way to limit email views? hi, sounds like the source code for the coupon was linked to a backend script that checked it against the ip address. When the email is opened the image only appears once, then is disabled for that ip, as for forwarding the email on the only way i can think of is attaching a different tracking image to each email, then you could check to see if the email is being opened from different ip's and disable any coupons. may need a good coder for that.

11-12-2009, 10:27 AM	#3
gordi555 HyperActive Warrior War Room Member Join Date: Nov 2009 Posts: 167 Thanks: 7 Thanked 10 Times in 10 Posts	Re: Any way to limit email views? Yeah maybe it could log a maximum of 2 IP address, if exceeds the rendering script returns a blackedout picture displaying a warning. To get this working you need to setup a script that you feed an email address to to determine what info is returned. Then from the HTML you put this script (example, process.php?e=test@test.com) as the SRC of the image. The email will then ping the SRC of the image tag, query your script, then return an image output. Don't worry about passing the IP address along as the script will detect it. Once this is in place you can see who the offending emails are and also how many different IPs get logged. Might sound complex but not really. Done it a few times.