Question

I plan on adding a logo image to an email newsletter and use it as a tracking image. This image will be hosted on my site (eg. my_logo.gif) and referenced in the html of the email (eq. <img src="http://www.example.com/my_logo.gif" />). I would like to create a script in php that emails me when that image is accessed/viewed. Is this possible? If so, how?

All ideas and suggestions to complete this are welcome.

Answer 1

Put something like this in an .htaccess file in the image directory:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.+\.jpg)$ image.php?image=$1 [nocase]

Put something like this into a file image.php in the same directory:

// send email here

header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
readfile($_GET['image']);

This is only a simple example, make sure you validate the $_GET['image'] variable to make sure it’s an image in the same directory, otherwise someone might be able to abuse this script to read files in other directories (image.php?image=../../../passwords).