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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'

#271

Post by diggernet »

relix wrote: post #175
logifail wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Can you give a source/reference for this? I'd like to understand it more. I don't allow any remote content when I read emails, and I get quite a lot of regular newsletters. Why am I not being unsubscribed?

Here for example is Gmail's explanation: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en CTRL-F "Send email to engaged users" Some choice quotes: - "Consider unsubscribing users who don’t read your messages." - "Periodically send a confirmation message to users to make sure they still want to get your messages."

I would note here that "consider" is not "supposed to". It's a suggestion that might help clean your lists, not a requirement.

Also, as someone whose mail client doesn't load external resources for privacy reasons, I'd be annoyed if you unsubscribed me because you weren't tracking my reading. However, an occasional confirmation (say, once or twice a year) as they suggest would be just fine. You could even restrict those to just those subscribers who do not trigger the tracker.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#272

Post by minikites »

relix wrote: post #264
minikites wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Any email tracking is user hostile. You don't need to know when or if I've opened an email for exactly the same reason nobody gets to know when or if I open traditional paper mail. It's a fundamental privacy issue and it is user hostile regardless of your noble intentions. It's not my job to make your job easier in this regard.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#273

Post by hedora »

relix wrote: post #199
zaudo wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no perfect solution but I think annoying some users by sending them an additional email to confirm what you are doing is preferable to annoying some other users by taking actions without informing them. Honesty really is the best policy.

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.

I’m continuously surprised to learn about all the little ways Google makes my internet experience worse, even though I don’t use their services.

Is there a reliable way to tell if an account is forwarding to Gmail? That way, you could reserve your spammer tools (not judging you for using them) for gmail users, and treat the rest of your subscribers with the respect you clearly intended.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#274

Post by kevincox »

OJFord wrote: post #107
vtd wrote: post #41

The same tracking functionality can be attached to logos in the email without raising any suspicion.

Who blocks (attempts to block) tracking pixels but allows other remote images? How many clients even offer that?

Thunderbird lets you select by image domain, which can be telling. However it is still guesswork.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#275

Post by eli »

alpaca128 wrote: post #260
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…

One online service (I think it was Ubisoft) wanted me to login at my unused account to unsubscribe from their newsletter. After a few cases like that you bet I'll take a shortcut if available.

That might be a CAN-SPAM violation you could report to the FTC

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#276

Post by eli »

mcv wrote: post #158
chrismorgan wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-anecdote: I’ve heard of people saying this, but never experienced it, except for the Daily UI mailing list that I once signed up for and received one email, but no more—until over a year later I tried loading remote images on that first email, then it switched to the daily progression.

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.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#277

Post by hedora »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #189
wruza wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do that because they have no guarantee that a site will respect an “unsubscribe” request, and it wouldn’t drag them through a shady multi-step “but why” dialog, and it wouldn’t send them another email with “Dear sucker, we see your request and sadly have to react, but you know how these servers work, right? Wait for a week or twelve before all our systems are aware that you wanted to unsubscribe from one of our…

I think you're missing the point. They opted in to receiving my email. They handed over their email address to me and requested that I send them an email. They then told their email provider that the email they requested was spam. I've considered putting up a page with a list of these peoples email addresses, but I feel like it would end up causing me more problems than it's worth. [edit] There should be a system whe…

Maybe a “click here to receive future emails” button in gmail that basically added your sending address to their spam filter allow list, and sent you a feedback loop email.

Once pressed, it would replace the “spam” UI element with “unsubscribe”.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#278

Post by [deleted] »

wahern wrote: post #9
pfundstein wrote: post #4

I can't think of any email clients that automatically download external images by default. The article seems to be over-blowing the issue a bit.

GMail displays them. It uses a proxy for downloading, but I don't think that matters unless they're preloading all images unconditionally upon server-side receipt of the message. Apple's macOS Mail.app client displays external images by default, as does their iOS app.

[deleted]

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#279

Post by relix »

diggernet wrote: post #271
relix wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here for example is Gmail's explanation: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en CTRL-F "Send email to engaged users" Some choice quotes: - "Consider unsubscribing users who don’t read your messages." - "Periodically send a confirmation message to users to make sure they still want to get your messages."

I would note here that "consider" is not "supposed to". It's a suggestion that might help clean your lists, not a requirement. Also, as someone whose mail client doesn't load external resources for privacy reasons, I'd be annoyed if you unsubscribed me because you weren't tracking my reading. However, an occasional confirmation (say, once or twice a year) as they suggest would be just fine. You could even restrict th…

Avoiding being marked as spam, even if you're legitimate, is much a "dark art". At any one point your reputation could take a hit because you did something, and no one will tell you what you did wrong. An ISP can just start redirecting your mails to /dev/null and you'd never find out about it until a user asks you why they haven't received a mail from you in 2 weeks. Malicious actors can also try and get you flagged as spam by artificially generating spam reports on you. There is no rule set you can follow that guarantees you're safe from ever being blackholed, it's all very fuzzy.

Once you're hit with a ban, it's very hard if not impossible to recover.

If you've been at HN for a while, you must have noticed that every now and then there are stories from Google users being mistakenly banned from their account for violating some rule that they don't even explain to them. These events happen to mailing lists as well, but there's even less of a recourse for mailers when this happens. Considering all this, I'd rather err on the side of caution and implement most of recommendations by Google, than increase my risk of being marked a spammer, and risk losing the whole project.

> However, an occasional confirmation (say, once or twice a year) as they suggest would be just fine. You could even restrict those to just those subscribers who do not trigger the tracker.

What is fine to you, is annoying to others. Just read the other comments on this story, where people commonly complain about receiving an email asking to reconfirm their subscription.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#280

Post by eli »

corty wrote: post #78
thepete2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be an unsubscribe email header for newsletters. Then it could even be a feature for mail clients.

There is, just many email marketing people leave it out to cut down on the unsubscribe rate. Subscribing has to be easy and in-the-face (like those 'helpful' popups on websites), unsubscribing has to be almost impossible. Not totally impossible, mind you, because otherwise courts get angry. Better email clients know to use the header, and e.g. gmail even asks about properly unsubscribing when marking a newsletter wit…

IMHO if you don't use the header that makes it easy for people to unsubscribe then you don't get to complain about people Marking Spam instead.
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