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Paste ID into email

I am trying to embed an ID in an email so that when a recipient replies to an email that my system sends, my system can pick it up and match it up with each other.

I tried to add a custom header however this is disabled when the user responds.

I tried to insert an HTML comment into the email, but the look and feel doesn't seem to preserve the comments when creating a reply email.

In the worst case, I might manually try to match sent and received emails by time, or have a visible tag in the body of the message.

Does anyone know of a more elegant solution?

Thank you in advance

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Email messages already contain such identifiers called Message-ID

. And even a way to send the message you are replying to by sending that id in the header In-Reply-To

. This makes almost all email clients that they usually execute their flows.



It is defined in RFC 822 (yes it is quite old) and is probably overridden and refined in more modern versions of this.

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I have seen a method that includes a single byte image with a unique name that is associated with the user. When they view email and download images, your HTTP server will record a hit for that unique image. Of course, the user needs to display images, but you can include a message in the body asking them to display images. We are actually embedding the content in the image so that they display the images.



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If the incoming email can handle the + foo or -foo suffixes, use that.

Many mail systems can route user +foo@example.com or user-foo@example.com to user@example.com. You can replace foo with some kind of identifier.

Several mailing list servers use this to track bounces.

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While I can't say for sure, my research on this issue some time ago yielded the following "conclusion":

  • Headlines are highly converting
  • The message body transforms a lot.

This is in part because I suspect:

  • It is necessary to protect users from malicious intent
  • You need to do "targeted marketing".

I've seen "unique codes" fly in clear text in an email element, but I would suggest having a unique ID embedded in the return address.

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The usual approach is to put the ID in the subject line and / or anywhere visible in the message body and tell the recipient not to change the subject or order the original mail when replying.

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