Email Tracker | Incredigeek

What is it?

EmailTracker is a program that allows you to find out info about someone you email.

Some of the info that the script can find out

Was the email read
When was the email read
What OS was used to view your email
IP Address of email recipient

How does it work?

The script is put on a web server which when run generates an image for you to put in your email. When the email recipient opens the email, their email client will go download the image off of your server. When the email client hits the server the transaction is logged giving you their device fingerprint, which gives you info like, what time was the email opened, what OS was used etc.

Current Issues

If the email recipient does not allow images to be downloaded, than this program will not work.

Currently the script just returns the device fingerprint. I would like to make the info a little bit more readable, maybe break up all the important info first into rows.

You currently have to create an html email, meaning you have to paste the raw html “code” into your email client and let it render it for you.

This software was not coded by angels – may have bugs.

How to use

What is needed

Access to a webserver and Apache access logs
emailtracker.tgz which contains the script and an blank image

Setting up and running the program

Download emailtracker.tgz and then upload to your server.

Extract the tarball

tar zxvf emailtracker.tgz

cd into the directory and chmod it

cd emailtracker && chmod +x emailtracker.sh

Edit the first part of the script and change “webdir”, “logread”, and “domain” to your web directory, Apache access log, and your website domain name i.e. “yourdomain.com”.

vi emailtracker.sh

...
# Change these as needed
domain="http://yourdomain.com/"
webdir="/var/www/html/home/"
logread="/var/log/apache.log"
...

now launch the script

./emailtracker.sh

The script will give some html code to insert into your email

now create a new email with the html “code” and send it. Now wait for the recipient to open the email…

When the email is opened emailtracker.sh will print the info on the screen and log it down in emailtracker.log and exit.

Example:

All the below commands are executed on the webserver.

Download script

wget http://incredigeek.com/home/downloads/emailtracker/emailtracker.tgz

extract and set the right permissions

tar zxvf emailtracker.tgz && cd emailtracker/
chmod +x emailtracker.sh

Edit variables in script.

...
# Change these as needed
domain="http://incredigeek.com/"
webdir="/var/www/html/home/"
logread="/var/log/apache_access.log"
...

Run script

./emailalert.sh

Email tracker has started.
Insert the following into your email...  BTW, make sure your sending an HTML email or it will not work.

<IMG SRC="http://incredigeek.com/home/123213-2222.png" ALT="N/A" WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1>

Monitoring website log
HIT!
8.8.8.8 - - [30/Oct/2015:23:00:21 -0000] "GET /home/123213-2222.png HTTP/1" 404 - "-" "Chrome/1.0 (OS X 10.11) Gecko/12331244 chrome/12.0"

Your Email was read at : [30/Oct/2015:23:00:21
IP Address of recipient: 8.8.8.8
If you need anything else check the log.
bob@incredigeek.com [~/dev]#

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