This is an example of html template with a spy pixel.
A spy pixel is a mechanism to implement a read receipt like on your emails.
- Open an http server on your computer. You can do this with Python:
python -m http.server 14789- Write your message on the
message.htmltempalte. - Change the IP address and the port of the image URL to match with your http server.
- Open the message.html in a browser
- Copy and paste the browser content in your mail editor
- Send the mail
Now you just have to wait for a request reaching your http server. When it is reached, it means that your message has been opened.
A lot of mail servers like Gmail, Exchange etc... open the images and store it in a cache. It mean that:
- the IP address reaching you http server isn't always your recipient IP address,
- your http server is not always reached if the recipient re-open your mail.
You can also use a spy pixel to monitor the affluence on a website or on an article.
This repository is a base of a concept. Unfortunately, it would be difficult to track many mails with it.
The next step of this approach is to create a server able to track each email separately, maybe using url parametres http://url?id=lol ?