Hi:

I have a dedicated server on which I run some websites. I want to start a viral marketing campaign and would like to track a message seeking support for my politics-related site.

Basically, the questions is Can I track how many people receive the email?
I know some times cause-related viral marketing track emails but I dont know if I have the capability (hardware+software) to do that..

Thanks!

The, as far as I know, most-used method would be to include an item that resides on a remote server. That of course implies you expect the majority of your users to accept HTML e-mail and not filter things in the application or at the firewall. The downside is that there will be a percentage of users that will only use or see text-based e-mail, filter things plus using a HTTP image does not show all users behind NATted devices. Then there are those users for whom HTML-based e-mail still is an Evil idea, who don't dig any activities of the "viral", "guerilla" or whatever type marketing calls it these days or just don't care for "spam".

Ya, anyway most mail providers these days seem to block web images by default, so any statistics that come from this way wouldn't be too dependable (and it'd end up annoying the ones who did care about such things).
If some one sent me a mail like that and wanted it tracked, I think the only way I'd be fine with it is if they had a simple 'click here to know more' link in the mail, and if I'm interested enough I'd click it. That's trackable. Of course this mightn't happen each time if it was a regular newsletter..

But anyway, I feel tracking should be opt-in.

"most mail providers these days seem to block web images by default" - really?

Hokay I checked my throwaway yahoo account, it shows everything happily At least Gmail seems to disable it (I dunno if that's the default or if I set it that way). I'll go back to my mail client now, hmph.

I employ multiple defenses against such emails. Mostly, I do not even see them - they are discarded as spam someplace along the way - and I do filter directly on HTML emails and discard them automatically.

Should an email from your candidate succeed in getting past my defenses to where I do in fact see it and have to handle it manually, I will take that as positive evidence to vote AGAINST your candidate.

I will vote against any candidate that sends me spam - and anything from them that I do not solicit IS spam, because I say so.