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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-16T05:39:45+00:00

I’m playing with the idea of adding email tracking to a web service I

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I’m playing with the idea of adding email tracking to a web service I built for a small client business. I was planning on doing the embedded image solution (with reference to an image on my server) – unless someone else has a better method – but when I use the image tag referencing a PHP page on my server it loads the “broken image” icon. How can I make this a valid image?

Here is the code for the mailing PHP page:

<?php
   $body = "<html>Hello there!".
    "<img src='http://mysite.com/track.php?name=bob' />".
    "</html>";

    $subject = "Tracking on ".date('Y-m-d H:i:s');

    $headers  = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
    $headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";
    $headers .= 'From: webmaster@mysite.com' . "\r\n";

    mail('my_email@gmail.com',$subject,$body,$headers);
?>

And here is the tracking code:

<?php
   include('database_connection.php');
   $query = "INSERT INTO tracking SET name='".$_GET['name']."', date=NOW()";
   mysql_query($query);

   // Tried this, but it doesn't work:
   echo "<img src='http://mysite.com/photos/image.jpg'>";
?>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you’re going to use a PHP script like that, it needs to return image data, not just a HTML image tag. Easiest way to do that will be something like:

    <?php
header("Content-Type: image/jpeg");
readfile("image.jpeg");

do_all_your_tracking_stuff();

    Note that this is returning the image data first, so that a mail client can start displaying it immediately, rather than waiting for your SQL queries to complete.

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