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Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#211

Post by jaywalk »

relix wrote: post #50

If you're running a mail newsletter, this tracking is pretty important. You're supposed to stop sending emails to someone who's not interacting with them, or you get an extra point towards being flagged as spam. Since people are already weary of clicking the unsubscribe link and instead casually mark everything as spam, every little bit towards keeping your reputation counts. It's a damned if you do, damned if you do…

I've got a system where a visitor to a web page can request to have product information emailed to them. That is the only way anyone would ever get an email from this system, and I don't even store the email address so I couldn't spam them if I wanted to. And yet, I still get a number of spam complaints every day.

I don't get it.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#213

Post by jcranmer »

encom wrote: post #106
wastholm wrote: post #59

What irks me is when email newsletters that I'm willfully subscribed to (the Economist comes to mind) inform me that "since I haven't been interacting" my subscription will be terminated. I have too been "interacting" (or as I call it, "reading") but my email client, very sensibly, doesn't load external resources, like pictures, willy nilly.

I think all sane email clients block external resources in emails. And if I ever get a time machine, I'm going back for the first guy to put HTML in emails, and then Hitler second. Additionally, if I'm receiving a message from example.com, and links in the message are not targeted at example.com, but some bullshit like sendgrid with a query string that won't fit across a 4K monitor, I'm deleting it. The other day I r…

> I think all sane email clients block external resources in emails.

Of the major email clients, I believe Thunderbird is the only one that does so by default.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#214

Post by chris_va »

jaywalk wrote: post #211
relix wrote: post #50

If you're running a mail newsletter, this tracking is pretty important. You're supposed to stop sending emails to someone who's not interacting with them, or you get an extra point towards being flagged as spam. Since people are already weary of clicking the unsubscribe link and instead casually mark everything as spam, every little bit towards keeping your reputation counts. It's a damned if you do, damned if you do…

I've got a system where a visitor to a web page can request to have product information emailed to them. That is the only way anyone would ever get an email from this system, and I don't even store the email address so I couldn't spam them if I wanted to. And yet, I still get a number of spam complaints every day. I don't get it.

... what if someone inputs a random email address?

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#215

Post by meamin »

korse wrote: post #212

How do tracking pixels handle a mailbox setting that doesn't load images by default?

They don't. I believe using this setting it is a good way to prevent tracking by pixel.

In addition, I think enforcing plain text emails would disable any client side tracking events.

EDIT: Well it looks like that setting in Thundebird prevents any remote connections. Not just pixels, so that be good enough. However emails often have a text back up that is going to be better formatted then a hampered html email.

EDIT: To prefer plain text in Thunderbird it is View -> Message Body As -> Plain Text

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#216

Post by beckingz »

relix wrote: post #124
Nextgrid wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why people would be wary of clicking the unsubscribe link on something they explicitly subscribed to in the first place. I mean, they trusted you enough to give you their email address to subscribe in the first place, right? The only scenario I can think of is when people didn't intentionally subscribe or were coerced into subscribing and those newsletters can go to hell and fully deserve to be marked as…

I believe it's because even though most newsletters are acting 100% legit (it would be pretty hard to keep going if not), there's always a few that would act like jerks and not actually unsubscribe you, or make you jump through extra hoops. Even if that's only 5% of the newsletters, those are the times that you as the reader would remember happening. A smooth unsubscribe experience is not memorable. It's worse becaus…

And then there are services that require you to log in to unsubscribe...

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#217

Post by jessriedel »

korse wrote: post #212

How do tracking pixels handle a mailbox setting that doesn't load images by default?

Do any email clients do the opposite and just download and save all images by default? This would allow your email client to render every email as intended, but would give no useful information to the tracking service.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#218

Post by mcv »

relix wrote: post #199
zaudo wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no perfect solution but I think annoying some users by sending them an additional email to confirm what you are doing is preferable to annoying some other users by taking actions without informing them. Honesty really is the best policy.

The problem is that doesn't stay contained for those few users. If a certain number of users mark your confirmation email as spam, your reputation suffers and there's a higher likelihood that suddenly your emails get sent to spam for all other users, because of that reputation hit.

If sender reputation is tracked that way, maybe reporter reputation should be tracked the same way. If someone reports a legitimate confirmation mail that they signed up for, as spam, then it's the spam report that shouldn't be taken seriously.

Overeagerly classifying legitimate email that someone subscribed to as spam is no better than classifying spam as legitimate. Especially on a system like GMail where one person's incorrect classification would lead to other people not receiving their subscriptions in their normal mailbox.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#219

Post by karaterobot »

relix wrote: post #50

If you're running a mail newsletter, this tracking is pretty important. You're supposed to stop sending emails to someone who's not interacting with them, or you get an extra point towards being flagged as spam. Since people are already weary of clicking the unsubscribe link and instead casually mark everything as spam, every little bit towards keeping your reputation counts. It's a damned if you do, damned if you do…

A trivial point, but I don't see that anyone's made it yet: one reason it's easier to report spam than to unsubscribe is that the UX for reporting spam is a lot better in Gmail.

If I want to politely unsubscribe from a newsletter I have to: switch from the keyboard to the mouse, hunt for the link in the email and click it, switch contexts to the browser tab it opens, hunt for the primary action on the page, figure out whether that action will confirm the unsubscribe, or whether clicking the button will sneakily re-subscribe me, and then close the tab.

On the other hand, if I report it as spam, I just press "!" one time and (in theory) I'll never see its ilk again.

Reporting something as spam is such a clean experience that I'm trained to use it for things it wasn't meant for, like unsubscribing from a legitimate newsletter. I suspect that this is true for other users as well!

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#220

Post by amluto »

The major email clients could easily fix this. Instead of having choices to not display images and display images, the choices should be no images, show embedded images, and show remote images. The latter should come with a big privacy warning and require dismissing the warning for every single email. Problem solved.
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