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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'

#291

Post by tomlagier »

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…

This is a bit of confirmation bias, I think - successful newsletters have enough reputation that the reputation loss from low open rate or higher spam flag rate is offset.

Newer newsletters don't have that reputation, so they are more heavily penalized for low open rate or higher spam flag rate. Thus, they need to react more quickly to users invisible actions or risk damaging their reputation. I don't think this is a growth hack, I think this is a necessary action as a new entrant in a very unforgiving space - see some stories upthread from legitimate newsletters.

While your actions are invisible to the sender, they are _not_ invisible to your email provider, and ultimately they are the ones who make reputation decisions that can destroy a newsletter.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#292

Post by abestic9 »

kijiki wrote: post #289
eli wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-spam technology forces newsletter publishers to do this. For example, gmail punishes senders who send too many messages that recipients don't interact with.

gmail presumably doesn't need to use a tracking pixel to determine if someone opened an email in the gmail interface...

But if I’m using IMAP I’m downloading all messages and potentially interacting with all, some or none of them.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#293

Post by anewone »

mcv wrote: post #191
relix wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I described is literally listed under "best practices for bulk senders" by Gmail. These are hoops I'm not fond of jumping through either, obviously, but if Gmail marks all my email as spam I lose 4000 subscribers overnight so I do what big G asks me to do.

I checked and found this: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en It doesn't mention pixels anywhere, though. It does contain the line: > "Consider unsubscribing users who don’t read your messages." But that's only after lots of mention of opt-in and unsubscribe options. And ultimately, you can't really know whether users read your messages or not.

Tracking pixels are the closest we have to determining whether somebody opens (& hopefully reads) the email. Click rate is the next best thing but unless you are an incredible marketer it will be far below open rate, possibly 1/4 or less. What Google is implying there is to use tracking images and automatically unsubscribe users that don't load them after several messages.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#294

Post by eli »

mappu wrote: post #286
eli wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ALL of the top 10 email clients download external images by default.

My Thunderbird doesn't. Is it no longer in the top 10? (Was it ever in the top 10?)

Hard to say since the data I'm aware of on email client usage comes from... loading images.

But Apple Mail, iOS Mail, Gmail, and Outlook alone are probably 80% to 90% of recipients.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#295

Post by anewone »

jedimastert wrote: post #261
wastholm wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And on top of that, some mail providers like Gmail won't even tell you this is happening. I understand why they don't but it's really difficult if you're a small time newsletter trying to get off the ground.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#296

Post by eli »

kijiki wrote: post #289
eli wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-spam technology forces newsletter publishers to do this. For example, gmail punishes senders who send too many messages that recipients don't interact with.

gmail presumably doesn't need to use a tracking pixel to determine if someone opened an email in the gmail interface...

But as a newsletter publisher they don't share that information with me. If I don't track it myself, eventually my engagement metrics will fall below a certain (undisclosed) level and everything goes to the spam folder.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#297

Post by anewone »

kijiki wrote: post #289
eli wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-spam technology forces newsletter publishers to do this. For example, gmail punishes senders who send too many messages that recipients don't interact with.

gmail presumably doesn't need to use a tracking pixel to determine if someone opened an email in the gmail interface...

They don't, but they also don't share that information with the sender. Gmail wants senders to be proactive and auto-unsubscribe disengaged recipients, which requires tracking open/click rates.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#298

Post by CodeMage »

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…

I'm honestly curious: are you talking about unsubscribing from a newsletter you explicitly subscribed to?

The vast majority of "newsletters" I get today are from companies that assume that I want to keep hearing from them just because I once did a one-time transaction with them. And no, it's not because I forgot to uncheck the "I want to receive blah blah blah" checkbox. I'm careful to opt out whenever there's an option for that.

I don't know about other people, but I call that stuff spam. Just because it isn't an e-mail from someone who got my address from a dump and decided to cold-mail me with their crap (or phishing or other scams), doesn't mean it's not unsolicited e-mail, i.e. spam.

Maybe things have changed over the years and I just wasn't paying attention, but I've trained myself not to press "unsubscribe" on something I didn't explicitly opt in to receive.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#299

Post by curryst »

CodeMage wrote: post #298
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…

I'm honestly curious: are you talking about unsubscribing from a newsletter you explicitly subscribed to? The vast majority of "newsletters" I get today are from companies that assume that I want to keep hearing from them just because I once did a one-time transaction with them. And no, it's not because I forgot to uncheck the "I want to receive blah blah blah" checkbox. I'm careful to opt out whenever there's an opt…

This is roughly what I do. Unsubscribe is for things I was interested in, but am not anymore (out of the hobby, getting too many emails to manage, etc).

Spam is for any kind of email I haven't opted in to receiving. That includes mail from organizations I have never requested contact with, as well as any emails I get as a result of UX dark patterns. I try to opt out, but some of them sneak past, and I don't feel bad dinging it as spam. That's the risk you take with opt-out mailing lists.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#300

Post by anewone »

anaerobicover wrote: post #253
pc86 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not familiar with this area. Can you explain the mechanism for this? What thing is imposing the "risk of being marked as spam", and how does it make its determination? Specifically, how does it have any idea about whether the end user has "opened" the mail?

Gmail can do their own tracking on what emails a user opens. If they find that a user is leaving a lot of mail from a domain unread, they might decide to start shifting that mail into the spam box to provide a better UX.

As a sender, it's impossible to get any specifics from Google as to when it happens. You can get a generalized spam report rate from them but that's about it.

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