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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'

#261

Post by jedimastert »

wastholm wrote: post #94
btgeekboy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite the juxtaposition seeing your post right next to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26163842

As someone with a daily email "newsletter" of my own [1], I am aware of (many of) the vagaries of spam filters. I use plain text only, though, so I couldn't use tracking pixels even if I wanted to. I do unsubscribe users if messages start bouncing but I have no way of knowing if they get silently dropped or spamfoldered. As someone who subscribes to lots of newsletters, the "interact or we will auto-unsubscribe you"…

> I do unsubscribe users if messages start bouncing but I have no way of knowing if they get silently dropped or spamfoldered.

IF you get spamfoldered by enough people the provider will just start sending to the spam folder for everyone. Your newsletter is now useless

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#262

Post by kube-system »

eplanit wrote: post #232
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…

"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." How about measuring interaction as the user doing something like logging into your site, buying a product, posting a comment on your site, sending you an e-mail -- those are actual interactions. By not coun…

It is quite common to measure all of those.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#263

Post by kube-system »

relix wrote: post #138
fraudsyndrome wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since people are already weary of clicking the unsubscribe link Can you please elaborate on this? Do you mean people intentionally avoid this because it leads to the advertisers marking that as "read" and therefore a live user? Asking because I recently purged my old emails which had thousands of emails, they obviously never stopped sending even with zero interaction. But my method was to click the unsubscribe link…

I don't think anyone should be scared of pressing the unsubscribe button in 2021. This was a common belief back in 1999, but I don't believe that should be anymore: spammers (legit spammers) don't care that there's an actual person on the other side. If the email address did not exist, the legit ISP's would have sent a notification on the feedback loop to the newsletter already, saying that this address does not exis…

If I know who the email is coming from, then yes, I use the unsubscribe button.

But I definitely don't click on unsubscribe buttons in unsolicited mail when I don't really know who it's from. It could be an attempt to identify a valid mailbox (and spam me more), or it could link to malware.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#264

Post by relix »

minikites wrote: post #243
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…

>If you're running a mail newsletter, this tracking is pretty important. Then it's exactly your job to figure out how to accomplish this in a less user hostile way.

Calling what HNDigest does user hostile is pretty far-fetched, but if you have an alternative idea that wouldn't make the experience worse for most of the subscribers I'm all ears.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#265

Post by iso1631 »

CptFribble wrote: post #249

This seems like thinly veiled marketing for Hey? "There's a Big Scary Problem you probably didn't know about, according to the founder of a service that solves that problem." [Image of what it looks like when the Big Scary Problem is solved by the service.] [Flattering image of the service founder, and a reference to the service as 'premium.']

That was my original thought this morning, such a blatant press release. A "ready to go" article to the journalist to do the work for the day and get on with something else, common practice.

However note the intro

"according to a messaging service that analysed its traffic at the BBC's request."

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#266

Post by relix »

mcv wrote: post #218
relix wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perso…

Certainly.

But that is not how it currently works.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#267

Post by ocdtrekkie »

achairapart wrote: post #72
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…

And also because of this, if you're blocking tracking pixels in a privacy conscious way you often get removed from the mailing list without any notice, which is very frustrating. Or you get one of those mail saying "We are removing you from the list because you don't read our newsletter", often without offering any other confirmation signal. Basically they says "Let us track you or you are out of this list". And this…

I have one mailing list I'm on where I get this all the dang time, and have to respond and tell them I'm reading, just not displaying tracking pixels.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#268

Post by alpaca128 »

jsmith99 wrote: post #182
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 wish The Economist was so careful when emailing me. I frequently get spam from them about 'exclusive subscriber only events' with no unsubscribe link because 'This service email [sic] contains important information about your subscription.'

Reminds me of my bank. Whenever they change their terms of service or do anything that could affect my account they send an automated notification email that pretends to have been sent by an actual employee, and always with a subject line like "XYZ sent you an important message regarding your account".

As any UI designer knows, if everything is important nothing is important, and so I just treat those as the spam they are. Which lead to a legitimately important mail getting lost, but it only caused problems for them so ironically they shot themselves in the foot with their dark patterns.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#269

Post by relix »

mint2 wrote: post #235
relix wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if that newsletter is using best practices. The recommended period is 90 days I believe, but you can get send an email asking if you're still interested (and in that email, there will be a link you should click if you want to stay subscribed). You may have had this happen before and probably thought that was just a scammy way to get you to click a link, but in fact it's completely legit.

But email clients let you set “do not load remote images”. I set it for the Mac app. How can a best practice be one that conflicts with easily toggled options and not weird settings.

Feel free to complain to Google, Yahoo et al about this. I'm just the messenger and engineer who needs to cater to their rules or risk getting kicked out.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#270

Post by jkaplowitz »

grishka wrote: post #187
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 open every single email I receive. How would one not? Would you have a permanent unread counter instead or would you delete them without opening or what?

In my case, permanent unread counter.
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