CODEWITHSUNDEEP
emailclient-side
Onur Kucukkece
Onur Kucukkece

Reputation: 1768

Detecting email client of the recipients

We are planing to develop an extension for a software which will detect the email client software or interface of the recipients and report it.

In many forums this subject is told that is not possible but in this site they claim that they provide a reporting in a large scale.

http://www.adestra.com/email-client-detection-with-messagefocus/

I would be glad if someone could tell or show me a way to do it in any platform.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3241

Answers (2)

Dumitrescu Bogdan
Dumitrescu Bogdan

Reputation: 7267

There are 2 situations here: - detect the client email agent of the sender - detect the client email agent of the receiver

  1. The SMTP protocol does not define anything that would allow you to identify the client agent. So in theory you cannot guess it. Some clients will send some sort of identification in the header, though also this is not standard, and it can be fake. You can guess the client agent base on these identifiers though.
  2. To find out the client agent of the receiver, you need to include content that will eventually connect to an http server. From there you can get the client agent (of the browser that opens it). So again, you have to do some guessing work. (ex. if it's yahoo.com and it is chrome .. then .. if it's ie then .. and so on.)

So to cut it short, there is not reliable way of finding out the client mail agents, it's more guessing and statistics.

Upvotes: 2

Kinexus
Kinexus

Reputation: 12904

The only way to do this is via the user-agent from a tracking image, you need the interaction via http. From there, you could determine, although not reliably, the email client in use.

Upvotes: 1

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