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Comment by oblib | Hacker News Reader

I use this on my invoicing app. I implemented it after years of the app's users telling me that some of their customers/clients would consistently deny getting their invoices. This required me to sift through my email server logs to see if it was successfully delivered and that's a pita that was costing me time and my app's users a lot of frustration.

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.

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Interesting, I hope this gets tested in court as I’d like to know the outcome.

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.”

It's been a very long time since I looked into it, but I do recall a court case that ruled delivering an invoice by email was considered the same as using the USPS.

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.

The Post Office can’t tell you if the recipient opened your letter—just that they received it. (And I don’t think we would want the Post Office to know which letters you read and which you junk, either!)

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?

In that analogy, it would be more like you can only know that your local post office delivered it to their local post office... you have no idea if the carrier actually delivered it to the mailbox, or if it is just sitting in their sorting room still.

The app does tell the user their document was successfully delivered or not as well. It also counts the number of times an invoice has been opened. I could also track the date and time of that but I don't.

The amount of false negatives (users received the invoice but disabled tracking pixels) must be large enough soon to cause issues for you on its own.

Paying the post office is very much different, for obvious reasons.

Presumably, a successful tracking attempt provides good potential evidence that an invoice was viewed. For everyone else, whether they haven't viewed it, or blocked tracking that they did, doesn't necessarily detract from the value they get from the evidence in the case of successes.

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. ;)

I struggled a bit with the ethics of this. My own experience with a client denying he received an invoice I mailed with the USPS certainly swayed my decision to implement it. It wasn't until I mailed the invoice with their "Certified Mail" option and disabled their web app just days before their big "debut" that they paid me. Had I not done that I have no doubt they would not have paid me.

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.

I think the kind of people that block tracking pixels and also claim that they don't receive invoices is small enough that this wouldn't be an issue. Most people just pay their invoices.

It wasn't a huge problem for the app's users, but it came up enough to make it worth implementing the feature.

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