331–340 of 341 posts
> if and when an email is opened how many times it is opened
Can someone explain to me how these work? Do you load remote content from a server so it knows that the email was opened? Does it re-download this image every time it is opened?
> Emails pixels can be used to log: > if and when an email is opened how many times it is opened Can someone explain to me how these work? Do you load remote content from a server so it knows that the email was opened? Does it re-download this image every time it is opened?
Some email services will cache the images for a period of time but in many cases it will perform a fresh request each time the email is opened.
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.
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.
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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.
And personally, I still think it's a bad idea to automatically unsubscribe people who are interested in your newsletter merely because they're not loading images. At the very least, make it very explicit that you're going to do this, and maybe give them the option to turn the auto-unsubscribe off.
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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.
CAN-SPAM should be extended to make it required for commercial mail to add this header.
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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.
And this is an example of worsening the user experience, where the previous comment is claiming that tracking improves it. There is absolutely no benefit to the user experience with the tracking here, only downsides; it is a punishment for disabling tracking. The only actual reason to track mail opens is pay-per-view advertising, everything to do with monetization and nothing to do with improving the UX.
And this is an example of stopping tracking worsening the user experience because the tracking improved user experience by removing people who aren't interested in the list.
> And this is an example of worsening the user experience, where the previous comment is claiming that tracking improves it. There is absolutely no benefit to the user experience with the tracking here, only downsides; it is a punishment for disabling tracking. The only actual reason to track mail opens is pay-per-view advertising, everything to do with monetization and nothing to do with improving the UX.
No it's not it's all about deliverability. Literally, they get penalties in their deliverability if they keep emailing you stuff you're not interested in.
It's not a penalty if you choose to go againist the grain and suffer the negative effects. Stop blaming others for the negative effects of your choices.
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Most people want images in their email to work
Inline images. Faster loading, and will still work when I look at the email years later when all the img links have rotted.
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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.
It is literally the default in Thunderbird and probably configured in a bunch of outlook settings. It is not the default in gmail, but it is not rare.
Anyone knows if pihole blocks those addresses?
Potentially, depending on your Pi-hole’s blocklists. For reference you could check against these popular spy pixel lists: https://github.com/apparition47/MailTrackerBlocker/blob/main... https://gist.github.com/dhh/360f4dc7ddbce786f8e82b97cdad9d20 https://gist.github.com/leggett/8c2ab9735037cb66c218fdbe898d...