How to collect mailing statistics: message received, opened, clicks inside?

Question

Email

There is a self-written mailing system in PHP (specifically: Yii + Swift Mailer ).
It is necessary to supplement its trace. functions:
1) display status - was the letter received
2) display status - was the letter opened
3) display status - were clicks made inside the letter
how to implement it better?
My thoughts:
1) analyze return bounce emails about non-delivery of letters - to understand whether a letter was received or not
2) add a small image (1x1px) to the HTML code of each letter - when displayed, a request to the server will be made and I will understand from it that the letter is open
3) a special label (of the utm type) will be added to each link in the email, which will signal clicks.
Am I thinking right?

Answer 1

God, yes, a hundred thousand times already explained - no way
Well, that is, without guarantees. Yes, in the SMTP protocol you can do anything you like in a letter - as long as it is in ASCII. But nothing prevents me (the recipient) from doing the exact same thing.
not necessary, if you received a bounce - the letter was not delivered. They can accept it, and send a bounce so that they don’t pester.
not necessarily if you didn't get a bounce - the email has been delivered to the final human user who will read it. It can be sent to quarantine by an antivirus, sent to a robot in a spam dump, sent to a non-existent user.
You can draw any conclusions on the presence or absence of a bounce - but they will be very conditionally correlated to reality.
MS Outlook can block pictures (I don't know how, by default, by politicians - it definitely can)
TB blocks pictures by default
In many large offices, links from a letter are cut out
. You can generally delete everything except the actual text.
Of course, if your main target audience is users of free mail.ru/gmail/yandex, it will more or less work with them. Will not work with corporate mail.

Answer 2

pmta has it all