31–37 of 37 posts
Standard email marketing best practice is to use this to see if the recipient is opening emails. If the recipient doesn’t, the sender should auto unsubscribe the recipient. Blocking tracking pixels means that the “good” email marketers will keep emailing until a manual unsubscribe event happen.
I'm a bit mixed for analytics and privacy matters. On one side, I prefer consent, limiting the amount of analytics made on me and I don't like giving my behavior for free. On the other side, I work in a Tech startup and we need to know what users are doing / thinking. It is so important to iterate and grow quickly. So it is the kind of stuff where I would like it to disappear, but at the same time I am a bit digging…
I use pihole and nextdns and hey.com email, all aggressively resisting advertising and targeting.
At the same time my coworkers need to report on opens and click through in their email campaigns.
Standard email marketing best practice is to use this to see if the recipient is opening emails. If the recipient doesn’t, the sender should auto unsubscribe the recipient. Blocking tracking pixels means that the “good” email marketers will keep emailing until a manual unsubscribe event happen.
Surely blocking tracking pixels looks just like not opening the email, triggering the autounsubscribe. I don't see the problem here. The recipient and mailer both get what they want.
Open rate is a large metric of whether a sender is considered a spammer or not by Gmail and Microsoft. Without these pixels, senders have no way to benchmark their own behavior against the general ecosystem. It's like asking a runner to get better but not telling them their own mile time. Clearly there can be other solutions like if major email providers gave senders aggregate data on the open rate of emails they process for a given sender, but then you get back into the question around if this is tracking etc much like in this thread.
I get why people do this. I used to use Freshbooks for my billing. They include tracking pixels in their emails, so I could see if a client had opened their invoice or not. If a client was late, I could adjust my behavior based on that tracking pixel (if they hadn't seen it, I would just send the invoice again vs. calling and trying to hound down a payment). That said, I don't like the idea of tracking pixels either.…
This is a valid use case, and it's a service you can get with snail mail, by sending it as "certified". Except for the fact that emails aren't particularly private, it seems reasonable that the same thing could exist for important emails. But if so, the fact that it's tracked should be as clearly exposed to the recipient as the certified snail mail envelope. Although that might not be possible to implement on top of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a valid use case, and it's a service you can get with snail mail, by sending it as "certified". Except for the fact that emails aren't particularly private, it seems reasonable that the same thing could exist for important emails. But if so, the fact that it's tracked should be as clearly exposed to the recipient as the certified snail mail envelope. Although that might not be possible to implement on top of…
Most USPS mail carriers aren’t actually doing the proper “certified mail” operations. And especially so since COVID.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That happens for some emails but I've also seen Gmail emails that activated tracking pixels normally.
Are those users using the web interface and using a Mail app to read their Gmail emails?