Gmail Image tracking changes: Oempro fix

Gmail recently made a fundamental change to how they serve images.

Gmail now serves images through a proxy and caching the image to speed up things and to reduce server load times. This is all great, however, this is a problem for ESP’s, as this will no longer reveal how many times and when a user opened up your email.

In order to avoid the gmail proxy and still be able to server the tracking image, simply edit the following file in your Oempro directory:

your_oempro_folder/track_open.php

Scroll to the bottom of the file and comment the following line:

// Core::DisplayTransImage();

Then we add the following code after the commented line

header("Content-type: image/gif");
header("Content-length: 0");
$FileHandler = fopen(TEMPLATE_PATH.'images/trans.gif', "rb");
fpassthru($FileHandler);
fclose($FileHandler);

This should fix the issue for now.

A special thanks to Andrew Bonar that explains more on this topic on his blog.