Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 341 posts

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#221

Post by upofadown »

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…

Gmail has the mis-feature where other users can mess up your mail delivery by marking things as spam. Are there others? Or is this just another example of how Gmail isn't so great?

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#222

Post by mariusor »

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…

> You're supposed to stop sending emails to someone who's not interacting with them

The only way that this justification makes sense to me is if you mail people that didn't explicitly subscribe to your newsletter in the first place. If that's the case, I think that the problem lies elsewhere.

An email is meant to be read, that's it. Any other interaction a user will have with it that is still under your concern is if they follow any links - I personally object even to that. Assuming to track anything besides people visiting your website from a newsletter link is an infringement of the unspoken contract between you and your subscribers.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#223

Post by pc86 »

mariusor wrote: post #222
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…

> You're supposed to stop sending emails to someone who's not interacting with them The only way that this justification makes sense to me is if you mail people that didn't explicitly subscribe to your newsletter in the first place. If that's the case, I think that the problem lies elsewhere. An email is meant to be read, that's it. Any other interaction a user will have with it that is still under your concern is if…

That may be how you want it to be, but it doesn't reflect reality. If you consistently have extremely low open rates (e.g. you send to a lot of people who aren't opening) your risk of being marked as spam increases. The only way to avoid this is to periodically cull your list of people who haven't opened in some amount of time.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#225

Post by dugmartin »

karaterobot wrote: post #219
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 ou…

If the newsletter uses a List-Unsubscribe header gmail will add a little unsubscribe button at the top of the email. It shows up in maybe 25% of the newsletters I receive.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#226

Post by jaywalk »

chris_va wrote: post #214
jaywalk wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I mean, they could. I don't see the point of that though. All of the product information is available directly on the page where they can email themselves, it's not like one of those "give us your email before you can see the info" things. It's more just to give the user something to reference.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#227

Post by FlownScepter »

achairapart wrote: post #193
hamlsandwich wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is that so many of the 'actions' people take with email are invisible to the sender: If the recipient marks you as spam, filters you to junk, blocks you as a sender or their client/provider auto-files you away somewhere, you as the sender get no indication of that. People won't click links in emails they've never opened, let alone read. 'Verification' tends to decay over time - even if I clicked t…

What I do with the email is invisible to the sender and it's ok. It's actually the way it should be. I clearly expressed interest in your newsletter by confirming the double opt-in. It's also ok if I open your newsletter only once in a while, I may be busy, or I only want to read your content when its title click something in me. The most successful newsletters respect this and did so for so many years. They never me…

> Instead, automation looks always fun and clever, until your growth-hack goes wrong.

"We found we can increase the number of people subbing for the newsletter by skipping double opt in"

"Why are we getting so many spam flags?"

Because the increase you gained was all the people who didn't want it, cosmic brain. The people who wanted it already had it.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#228

Post by leesalminen »

amluto wrote: post #220

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.

That sounds like terrible UX. Users will automatically click on the button so that they can see their email. Nobody reads pop ups.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#229

Post by jjulius »

Nextgrid wrote: post #66
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'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'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?

You're assuming that they willingly signed up for it and weren't added to the list because of someone selling their data to another marketer, a dark UX pattern tricking them into signing up for the newsletter when they made a purchase, etc.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#230

Post by kergonath »

dugmartin wrote: post #225
karaterobot wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ou…

If the newsletter uses a List-Unsubscribe header gmail will add a little unsubscribe button at the top of the email. It shows up in maybe 25% of the newsletters I receive.

Same for the various versions of Apple Mail. No idea whether there is a keyboard shortcut though.
Post reply on HN