301–310 of 341 posts
Hey [1] blocks tracking pixels but is smart enough to still show images. https://hey.com
If it's allowing images it's allowing tracking, unfortunately.
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.
The way to solve it is for the email provider to download the images for you, not when you open the email, but as soon as they receive it, and then display the images from their local cache. That way your IP never hits the pixel's home server, and you can see the email as it was intended to be seen.
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.']
I'm unimpressed with Hey's ability to prevent tracking.
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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.
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Terrible. Just send a verification email that says explicitly that you need to either respond to it, click a button or load the images on that email to receive further mails. Leaving people in the dark about this sort of requirement should be considered an anti-pattern.
This is exactly what we do on our newsletters, but to be fair "not loading images due to privacy concerns" is an edge case and I could understand a lot of mailers not thinking about it or not caring about it.
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Gmail has this, it's in one of the dropdown menus. If you mark something with the right email header as spam, it even ask if you wish to unsubscribe instead. Spam companies often use this to check if the email address they've targeted is real because they get callbacks from legitimate users. I've only seen one or two legitimate uses of the header as far as I can remember.
in one of the dropdown menus As if gmail ui wasn’t already obscure af. They could make “don’t want this anymore” button that uses unsubscribe header first and if it doesn’t work, mark it as spam automatically. Many shady practices would disappear at that same moment, but who cares when making six figures a year. If only email could work as a modern instant messenger - no spam, reacting to explicit and well-defined us…
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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.
That is surprising, and unfortunate. I believe this will ultimately have to change. The percentage of people blocking remote content will only go up. I block ALL remote content in my emails, and there is nothing that will convince me to stop doing that.
Anyway, it's been like this for years and the overwhelming majority of email clients load images by default so everyone mostly works around it. I don't think it's changing any time soon.
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Tracking is already stopped for lots of people through plugins, containers etc., and we like it. It doesn't actually change the user experience, except maybe to stop some of the creepier features working, and speed things up in general.
But you haven't actually felt the effects because they're able to do enough of it to improve UX. And this thread is full of people complaining that once they stopped tracking in emails they were getting unsubscribed from newsletters they were reading. So, not everyone is enjoying it.
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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…
Another is if you get signed up for multiple different streams of messages ("What's New!", "Tips to Get the Most out of X", "Company Communications", "Coupons", etc.) just by signing up for an account (and, as you point out, not actually opting in for any of them explicitly). Since Gmail does not always flag all of these different things as spam, it can be more efficient to go to the "unsubscribe" page and uncheck each of these streams yourself.