The life and death of email read tracking
missiveapp.com
missiveapp.com
Anecdotal, but I noticed a definite change in the tone of sales emails I was getting after I turned off images in Gmail. When they could tell I was reading their garbage but not responding, there was a lot of "tell me why you aren't interested" and "just a fifteen-minute call, just fifteen minutes we swear" and "please just talk to me, why won't you talk to me?"
They saw I was opening the emails—at this point, if I see something bold, I tap it without thinking—so they thought they had a chance, and they were really obnoxious.
I finally switched off images. After they stopped being able to tell if I was seeing their stuff, they got a little less pushy; they couldn't be sure I'd gotten their first email, so they focused more on re-explaining their product than trying to guilt me into reacting to them.
(I'm a little more understanding of people who use these to determine how much dead weight their mailing list has. Especially if you're an indie creator, you don't want to be paying for the 20% of people who might not be reading your newsletter. I don't mind a "please let us know if you're reading our newsletter" email as long as they're not obnoxious about it.)
So right now you’re hindering the algorithm of making these decisions, which leads to more generic emails. Consider it the email equivalent to blocking cookies. :)
I suspect the thing we heard about means Gmail is messing up the IP address/location tracking aspect of a tracking pixel, but still loading it on email opens. The bargain of "we'll hide the user's IP, but still allow you to track their behavior" sounds like the devil's bargain I'm used to from them.
No. They request the image (through their proxies) the first time it's loaded. Only subsequent requests are loaded straight from the cache.
That means that, if trackers send personalized tracking pixels (which literally all do), then they still know the first time you read the email. (The only thing that's changed is that they can't tell when you open it subsequent times, and they can't get location information and the like from your IP address).
In exchange for taking location tracking away from marketing companies, they turned images on by default for Gmail users.
That demanding, presumptuous tone in an email is indeed a fast way to generate annoyance. With or without read-tracking, it's a bad approach to sales.
I received mail via an address obviously obtained via a scraper or purchased spam list, with a subject of "quick call on Friday?". When that bait failed to work, they then had the audacity to send a mail asking for reasons for the lack of response, with such options as "I'm busy, reach out again in a month", or "I'm not the right person, but I've CCed another contact", etc. Naturally, there was no option for "You're a spammer and in an ideal world you'd go out of business".
Ironically, it was a company offering lead generation and sales, so the fact that they're spamming is a very clear sign that their services are highly suspect.
When I have the time and inclination, I go through the email headers of such mails, and report them to their mailing list service (some of them are very good about removing spammers), their hosting provider, their domain name provider, their email provider (gmail never seems to act on spam reports, but perhaps others might not be), and anyone else who might be able to stop the spam.
And yeah, pretty much every such email I've received was from companies who seemed to pride themselves on their interpersonal services or abilities. Given that they managed to irritate me in under ten seconds, I did not have a whole lot of faith in their abilities.
I use apple mail, and turn off remote images.
HOWEVER it has a huge privacy hole. If I forward an email it loads all images.
I found this out when I wanted to forward a phishing email to IT. ugh.
I semi regularly use the prune feature of my mailing list client to get rid of people who haven’t opened emails recently. I suppose this may be removing active subscribers? If so, is there another way to achieve this goal? (Removing non-active members helps reduce spam reports and helps with deliverability I think)
(My niche is non technical so they probably use email app defaults for images)
About a month ago I got a 'still interested?' email that I could click on a link to say I was.
Looks like they were using ConvertKit.
Issues with email tracking has been a known issue for over a decade, so you would hope they would have that as part of their service. Might be worth using a test email to try it out.
I run many small (and a few quite bigger than small) email ingress/egress systems for several decades now. I also worry about a fair few mailbox stores.
Email is quite old and was never designed to worry about things like security. It was designed to get a message from A -> B. Regardless of that, it is the Pony Express realised (says British bloke!)
I absolutely HATE these. Yes, I saw your email two weeks ago. No, I didn't want to talk to you then. No, if you send me a second email (especially if it's a condescending attempt at a power move like 'I didn't see your response to my last email, please let me know when we can meet up') I will absolutely not ever want to talk to you or buy anything from you.
[...]
>Now, if the love letter author inserted a pixel tracker, they can know every single time you did go back to that email, and read it again and again. Not cool.
How is the first example any less creepy than the second example?
However, because they're in bed with the advertisers, they make it so you either choose a degrading email experience for all your emails, or allow yourself to be tracked.
It doesn't work for gmail users. Tracking pixel will only be fired the first time the email is opened. After that, images will be served via google proxy servers.
Source: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html
It's not. The whole concept of 'read receipts/tracking' in general, whether it's email or messaging or whatever is starting to get to me.
I've never actually heard of a positive use for them and I know they've personally caused me stress before as well as people I know and people's stories i've read.
I honestly can't see the desirability about a feature that allows you to see when others have read your message.
Even in your examples, they cause stress, the marketer and the love letter writer are stressed waiting, the person receiving the letter if they knew reads were being tracked would be stressed.
It really creates a strange conversation dynamic and the more communication methods that have it, the more uncomfortable I find communicating to be.
"did you call and ask this person for the follow-up you're claiming they haven't given you in three days?"
I had no clue-now I'm not going to press the matter and push the person into it, yet at the same time here we're sitting on a decision being left open by one person, and not being acted on at all by another.
Makes for some interesting manager decisions, it does.
Take a kid, who has a phone, and a peer group with elaborate customs around using it, which include never, ever calling someone without texting first. Maybe your best friend and main squeeze, as a special privilege.
Then the parent insists the child pick up the phone whenever they call. Also, there are spam calls, and the occasional genuine emergency.
Presto, the phone ringing is automatically Bad News, and as the child grows to adulthood, they associate phone calls with trouble, and subconsciously feel like an aggressive, bad person, if they have to make one.
Phone calls are, after all, even more aggressively demanding that someone else's attention be, right now, dedicated to dealing with you than any tracker.
Coming from someone who had a parent who liked to LIE (yes, straight up bold faced lie) about there being a “family emergency” because I didn’t answer each and every single phone call they made fast enough (surprise, teenage me had a job and I couldn’t just stop making pizzas because dad wanted another check-in) I completely empathize
People tend to describe this dynamic as "always-connected" or something similar, but that verbiage really just scratches the surface of the underlying mechanics. At it's heart, it's all about trying to increasingly make "your time" into "my time", and that's not fair if you go back to our basic assumptions about what makes us human and why freedom is important.
Almost every dystopian sci-fi novel includes the theme of humans in some way being enslaved to machines, and this dynamic is the beginning of just such a thing. Here, the machine is not yet a machine but rather another person, but the outcome is the same; it starts to become a form of "attention slavery".
I mean, I've already spent nearly half an hour looking at zooming into the mandelbrot fractal. But... that's different...
When placing an order via email it's really useful to get an automatic confirmation that the order has been read.
Love is a much more personal and private topic than a b2b capital expense.
It wasn't just about finding out when or where someone was opening it. It was about finding out who was forwarding these emails. Because there was a cost to be on this mailing list- if you're forwarding the contents, you're effectively pirating that information (I wave my hands a bit as I say this because there's a loooot of interpretation there and you are welcome to disagree).
So if you send out your latest post to 500 (paying) customers, you could see- how many people read it? How many people came back and read it again later? And most importantly, how many different IP addresses were loading that tracking pixel? Oh, the tracking says the content I sent to John was opened by 1000 different people? Okay, John is off the list now.
What made it better was that a lot of the content was graphical. So the 'tracking pixel' was the content itself. Short of downloading and forwarding the image, you couldn't share it without there being a record.
The company wasn't what I wanted to do so I moved on pretty quickly- but it still strikes me how neat it all was.
Edit later: Oh right, the other thing- you could tell what company the person who opened it was at by the IP Address, some of the time! "Hey, I didn't send it to anyone at <Company>, why the $%&* are they reading it?"
This is awful and precisely the reason I set my mail clients to not open remote content by default since I started using email decades ago.
If this exact situation occurred to me as a prospect, I would likely never deal with that company again.
Of course, the catch is, I open their emails several times a week: I just block remote images. I replied back to them to tell them I don't appreciate them trying to track whether or not I open my mail in my inbox, but to keep me on the list.
I could get upset and unsubscribe because I'm annoyed they're relying on tracking, though FWIW, my experience demonstrates their tracking isn't working. And hopefully, me directly communicating with them that their strategy is both ineffective and unappreciated may help nudge them away from this sort of behavior.
... as measured by the exact same totally flawed technique the article at the top of this thread links too.
:sigh:
I guess for companies like, say, Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor or newsletter services like Tiny Letter - there's a big difference between a "maybe 70% accurate open rate of 50%" compared to a "maybe 70% accurate open rate of 0.1%", and the second should quite certainly be grounds for firing you as a customer. Sadly the "marketing automation" industry mostly likely think 0.1% open rates are acceptable and instead of firing that client instead recommend sending their email to 10 or 100 times as many email addresses is a great idea.
People implenting and using such a feature (from the sender side) should be fired on the spot.
People will also enter in junk email addresses so it is to clear them out to keep your list clean.
Those who are interested in the email content and still have images turned off are rare in practice. Even then, I also checked for email clicks and logins for some redundancy.
How do you know this? Maybe you keep kicking them off your list and are misinterpreting your signal. What percentage of your addresses never phone home?
I think this is the point of the post as people assume this functionality works and make decisions.
It seems like a low cost to maintain people who subscribed but never loaded a tracker image.
Not sure your product, but I think people who turn on this feature are savvier than some users. So pruning them from your list would remove potentially lucrative customers.
I think this availability bias of data leads companies to doing some weird, suboptimal things. Like using Facebook in place of market research leaves out non-Facebook users, etc etc.
> It seems like a low cost to maintain people who subscribed but never loaded a tracker image.
On the contrary. Each send costs. This adds up. It also adds cost to the overall processes involved due to unbounded growth in possible recipients.
Reputation with service providers is another concern. Google, for instance, will punish a sender's deliverability if enough recipients never open emails. Failing to clean your list impacts the ability to deliver to active users.
> What percentage of your addresses never phone home?
These were an extreme outlier. Such that it's simpler to send an email communicating the pending removal unless they opt-in.
> So pruning them from your list would remove potentially lucrative customers.
These decisions aren't made in a vacuum. Links themselves are also tracked. Those users also weren't actively clicking emails either.
On the system I was cleaning up, something like 20% of outbound emails had _zero_ engagement.
But entering a junk email suggests an email address is required for other content.
Do you confirm addresses on sign-up?
"Sure thing, boss." I let it work for a few days, then turn it off. Turn it back on before he comes to check why it isn't working.
"Gee, boss, I dunno. I don't even notice that, now." He goes away to 'think' about it. I keep it on for a few weeks. Then I turn it off, for the last time. I never heard from that PHB on that subject ever again.
Read receipts aren't something people ACTUALLY want. It's something they want to want. Or want you to want. Either way, nobody actually wants that unless you're trying to externalize your coping strategies onto those around you, which is maladaptive and very no bueno.
I imagine some of the downvoters are mad that the person used an indirect means instead of a direct one, but people like this don't respond to saying "no, this is a dumb idea" very well.
Yep. That was exactly her. And why she was in the first batch shown the door when the COVID cuts came.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/how-to-block-email-pixel-tracki...
I guess I'm disabling images in email. I thought email providers would have closed this obvious privacy disaster... but nope.
[1] Fastmail also has a "middle-ground" option to show remote images if it's from someone in your contacts, if you want a way to filter it dynamically a bit. I leave mine on a straight block, but if you really hate seeing "ugly" emails, it's a nice option.
The app also allows users to create estimates, proposals, receipts, etc. I don't implement tracking on any of those documents, only invoices. An invoice is a "legal instrument" and I consider the documenting of it being opened a tool my users can offer a court of law as evidence their invoice was successfully delivered and viewed by the recipient. A court can certainly reject it, but they may also accept it.
I see it as little different than paying the Post Office for "Tracking" something you've mailed with their services.
Paying the post office is very much different, for obvious reasons.
That being said, I'm happy to block any tracking, and the fact that it might mean I'm leaving less potentially-incriminating evidence for a court of law is a nice perk.
Which is to say, I can see the reason the parent poster has to implement this as a feature, and can also say everyone in their right mind should ensure they're blocking it. ;)
It's probably been around 8-10 years (at least) since I implemented that feature in my app and I've not had a user contact me about a client of theirs denying they've received an invoice since. That's only anecdotal evidence of effectiveness but it's worth noting.
That said, I do think using pixel tracking in a marketing email is a slimy practice. I don't block it by default though. I still flag junk and delete spam once or twice a day.
So your old process of checking the email server logs seems more analogous to Post Office tracking to me. Would it be possible to automate that?
Since I can open an email without you knowing and I can load your tracker image without reading it, I don’t think it will stand up.
I think a more reliable method is a system that requires a user to do something to acknowledge and sign. I refinanced a mortgage recently and had something like this where the email just contained links that I had to log in, view, and accept. That seems a bit more reliable if I actually want to prove that someone was “served.”
The software just increments a counter when the invoice is opened and calls the url for the image. The image url is only used in the customer's email and it has a unique id. The url points to a server side perl script that associates the id with an invoice and increments a counter if some tests are successful.
So, while I'm sure one could probably figure out how to spoof the counter the process is obscure enough to make that improbable.
Fixed; created a cron job to curl relevant tracking pixels once a month.
ProtonMail claims to be working on a solution as of 2 years ago[1] but has not yet shipped anything in this domain.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17611361 (ProtonMail employee, responding to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17610732 )
What you mention is the ability for your email client to send a "that email was read" message when you send an email with such a request.
It makes the whole interaction more creepy, moreover, I don't think that a lot of webclient support it (or even Smartphone apps).
It's kind of a dying feature.
I never considered that a consensual request prompt could be considered 'more creepy' than non-consensual spying. What about that interaction upsets you? Simply knowing that someone wanted to do it?
The reason people are creeped out when you ask them whether or not you can monitor them is because they don't want to be monitored. Skipping that question and tracking them without their permission doesn't make it less creepy, it makes it more creepy.
This is why people build features like this. They want to track their email to you, and they want to do it without your consent.
And that it can save their company in the long run means that everyone wins. Or at least I hope so; they're doing the right thing.
To expound;
It's always easy to justify something for your case; but that doesn't make it ethical.
- https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681655/superhuman-email-... - https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681655/superhuman-email-...
That said, we use tracking pixels in our support ticket system because we often do have certain clients who simply can't receive email from Zendesk for whatever reason. The read receipt gives us a positive signal that they received it, or conversely if we _don't_ see a read receipt, it's a low quality signal that maybe they didn't receive our response.
This should just be a first-class, front-and-center feature already. Everybody plays this game. It's so stupid.
Just let me skim my messages at midnight without signaling to co-workers that I'm up and that they should feel free to continue bothering me.
Also better that other people do the same to me so I don't keep sitting there like an idiot waiting for a response that isn't going to come.
Remember status messages? Available / away / idle? That you could set manually? Before Google Hangouts decided that everybody who owns a phone should just be green all the time, which EVERY OTHER CHAT APP decided to copy? So fucking stupid.
Things are getting out of hand shitty with these adcentered A/B big data UIs.
Remember AIM away messages that would auto respond to friends with a custom message if you were logged in but AFK or even sitting at keyboard but wanted some quiet?
I miss it.
So much so that I’ve started writing an auto-responder for slack because despite having a “Presence”/Status feature that I use very judiciously (In a Meeting/On a call/Gone to Lunch/PTO) I’ve found-across multiple jobs-people barge right through them, then follow up with emails asking “are you available for a moment?” when I’m really trying and desiring focus (and also because I’m not signing up to someone else’s hosted SaaS service to do this).
You know what, we could prevent maybe like over 75% of all domestic violence by installing surveillance cameras in every home, good idea right?
Not affiliated, just a happy user for a few years.
It is stretching an idea, but I want this to happen to stop them.
I can't tell offhand whether the Chrome version does the same.
As for Firefox, the reviews seem to tell otherwise, it's not been updated for over 2 years (same for chrome as well).
[1]https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/answer/2664769?p=...
[0] https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/why-is-backblaze-tracking-m...
75%-80% open rate for many of my campaigns tells me the title is misleading, those pixels are firing in all the major providers.
Putting people in email/SMS funnels based on which emails they read is ENOURMOUSLY beneficial to my clients.
This is something that's really very basic.
Client Sells Widgets. He sends 3 emails to email base on small widgets, green widgets and cheap widgets.
If the client opens one of these but not the other, does it not make sense to send further information that is relevant to their interest? I mean, if they open the green widgets email on my funnel, they will be getting A LOT MORE green widget emails because they will be moved from funnel to funnel based on their activity or lack thereof.
Good email tracking is part of good marketing. Something I do see commonly is tech founders looking down on marketing. This leads to low budgets and attracting low quality candidates. Modern marketing tools are like machine guns. And most marketing people are like chimps. So that's why you see silly emails like 'I see you are opening my email, why don't you answer' - which is insane from a marketing point of view, why creep people out? So silly.
Good open rate data gathering results in you not knowing that it's being tracked. You simply get more targeted stuff and less stuff that is outside your interest.
Back in 01 when I started in digital marketing, good attribution of sales and marketing was something people spent 7 digits creating custom solutions. Now we can string a few SAAS providers together and get amazing details. It just needs to be set up intelligently.
Having said all of this: of course I don't allow images to display by default on my email provider. But I'm privacy minded and most people aren't. Which is fine, the world is diverse and that's a good thing. I love choice.
There are ways to mitigate false positives, and many of the best SAAS work tirelessly to constantly incorporate every new update and every new technique to try and correct data to make it as clean as possible. The techniques are many and I'm generally not on the cutting edge of that particular niche. But I know people who are.
And it only has to be accurate enough to be profitable.
If I get it right 80% of the time and increase CLV by 30% while increasing marketing costs by a small amount, that's an objective win.
We're not sending people to Mars. And even then, every measurement has a margin of error. It's the inherent nature of measurements.
Until we actually figure out these questions outside of layering hacks (i.e. “block image subresources entirely”), it seems like we should definitely put a pause on the whole effort.
> The reason people are creeped out by "I see you are opening my email" is because the tracking itself is unexpected and unwanted
Yes, but there's no reason to be, tracking is well known for anyone who wants to know it. A google search is not a high barrier to obtaining information. And it's not my clients obligation to inform the public. You can make a case that schools should teach this. That public officials should spread it. That non profits promote it. That the media should mention it more.
To argue that my client producing widgets is not disclosing it further than they already do in the Privacy policy, in the disclaimers in emails and in their terms and conditions... is IMO unreasonable.
The reason I don't mention "I see you are opening my emails" is because it makes people uncomfortable. Which is why this topic isn't in the news. To blame a small business owner producing quality widgets and their marketing guys for the society we create jointly is immature at best.
I do my part on my dime and my time. I'm not going to feel guilty or apologize for providing value to businesses that provide value. I live and work within the constrains of the real world and actively try to make those constrains better. I don't think it's reasonable to expect more of people.
This is why people don't like marketers.
So you do acknowledge that it is creepy and undesired, and your solution instead of not doing it is just to not mention it but do it anyway. Classy.
> To blame a small business owner producing quality widgets and their marketing guys for the society we create jointly is immature at best.
We're not doing that jointly buddy. You are the one doing it and you only get away with it by trying to hide it as you mentioned just above.
My solution is to use standard industry practices while supporting non profits and politics that improve the overall ecosystem.
It's what adults do. But I guess attacking strangers on the internet is where true class comes from?
> We're not doing that jointly buddy. You are the one doing it and you only get away with it by trying to hide it as you mentioned just above.
The only reason I'm doing it is because it's industry standard practice and it works. You can't bring a knife to a gun fight. Acting like that can happen just shows me you aren't well engaged with the real world. Insinuating my small business clients should not segment email audiences while their competitors do it is just unrealistic and disconnected from how the world operates.
Real world people who actually care about privacy and not grandstanding or throwing rocks in an effort to virtue signal... they actually sign up at EPIC and EFF and contact senators and congressman about specific privacy legislation. At least that's what I do to improve the situation. What do you do that I should be doing to improve our situation in relationship to privacy?
At some level you know that people react badly when they know they're being tracked, so it's important to help ensure they are not aware of the tracking.
> Having said all of this: of course I don't allow images to display by default on my email provider. But I'm privacy minded and most people aren't. Which is fine, the world is diverse and that's a good thing. I love choice.
You don't like being tracked. You make a living tracking others, or helping others to do so. You think it's important to not let people discover that they're being tracked. Then you rationalize it as people making the "choice" to be tracked.
There may be an internally consistent case to be made that this is above board and ethical, but you haven't made it.
It's just as creepy even if you don't send the dumb email followup.
You don’t actually ever have anything close to that. The big marketing automation platforms apply “correction factors” because most mail clients block images by default.
Create a seed list of 100 emails you control, make sure you open exactly one of your test emails, and watch your “marketing automation” tool lie to you when it comes to open rates.