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Comment by wastholm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I wish The Economist was so careful when emailing me. I frequently get spam from them about 'exclusive subscriber only events' with no unsubscribe link because 'This service email [sic] contains important information about your subscription.'

Reminds me of my bank. Whenever they change their terms of service or do anything that could affect my account they send an automated notification email that pretends to have been sent by an actual employee, and always with a subject line like "XYZ sent you an important message regarding your account".

As any UI designer knows, if everything is important nothing is important, and so I just treat those as the spam they are. Which lead to a legitimately important mail getting lost, but it only caused problems for them so ironically they shot themselves in the foot with their dark patterns.

It's quite the juxtaposition seeing your post right next to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26163842

As someone with a daily email "newsletter" of my own [1], I am aware of (many of) the vagaries of spam filters. I use plain text only, though, so I couldn't use tracking pixels even if I wanted to. I do unsubscribe users if messages start bouncing but I have no way of knowing if they get silently dropped or spamfoldered.

As someone who subscribes to lots of newsletters, the "interact or we will auto-unsubscribe you" thing still annoys me.

[1]: https://www.aphorismsgalore.com/daily

> I do unsubscribe users if messages start bouncing but I have no way of knowing if they get silently dropped or spamfoldered.

IF you get spamfoldered by enough people the provider will just start sending to the spam folder for everyone. Your newsletter is now useless

And on top of that, some mail providers like Gmail won't even tell you this is happening. I understand why they don't but it's really difficult if you're a small time newsletter trying to get off the ground.

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.

Curious to know how gmail does this. If I open an email without downloading external resources, surely gmail knows that I opened it and doesn't punish the newsletter publisher.

gmail presumably doesn't need to use a tracking pixel to determine if someone opened an email in the gmail interface...

But as a newsletter publisher they don't share that information with me. If I don't track it myself, eventually my engagement metrics will fall below a certain (undisclosed) level and everything goes to the spam folder.

That is surprising, and unfortunate. I believe this will ultimately have to change. The percentage of people blocking remote content will only go up. I block ALL remote content in my emails, and there is nothing that will convince me to stop doing that.

Can you imagine the comment threads if google was secretly sharing inbox engagement data with marketers?

Anyway, it's been like this for years and the overwhelming majority of email clients load images by default so everyone mostly works around it. I don't think it's changing any time soon.

All it would take is a single default configuration change by Apple, Microsoft, or Google. It is not crazy at all to think that Apple would change the default setting to block loading remote content.

Most people want images in their email to work

It's as easy as doing it the exact same way Hey does. "We blocked external trackers in this email, click here to learn more."

I'm curious how they're doing it. Without having used their product, I gather that they're blocking certain known trackers and/or checking for tracking pixels directly. But it's not hard to put a unique tracking link on any arbitrary image which is part of the email's content. The only full defense is turning off all images.

edit: apparently they automatically cache the images on delivery, which should work. This is really a change that needs to come from the mail providers so good on them. As long as they don't try and assume what the user is interested in like Gmail does, they can drop tracking all they want.

That is going to lead to it appearing that people have high email engagement which will cause them to be on more mailing lists and at higher frequency than they otherwise would be.

Inline images. Faster loading, and will still work when I look at the email years later when all the img links have rotted.

In a lot of instances you get penalized for large messages. Email marketing is a tough business.

They don't, but they also don't share that information with the sender. Gmail wants senders to be proactive and auto-unsubscribe disengaged recipients, which requires tracking open/click rates.

But if I’m using IMAP I’m downloading all messages and potentially interacting with all, some or none of them.

I think all sane email clients block external resources in emails. And if I ever get a time machine, I'm going back for the first guy to put HTML in emails, and then Hitler second.

Additionally, if I'm receiving a message from example.com, and links in the message are not targeted at example.com, but some bullshit like sendgrid with a query string that won't fit across a 4K monitor, I'm deleting it.

The other day I received an email from ft.dk, the danish Folketing. Our parliament. I mean legit dot gov stuff. It had email tracking through Sendgrid. I sent them a strongly worded email and asked them to cut American tracking companies out of our democratic process. And then I deleted the email.

All this tracking seems to have just become the new normal, and hardly anyone cares about it.

Your government should have a place where you can report phishing email. I would definitely report mails with these kind of suspicious links. If they see their legitimate emails getting recognised as phishing, hopefully they'll reconsider their bad practices.

> I think all sane email clients block external resources in emails.

Of the major email clients, I believe Thunderbird is the only one that does so by default.

The ACS (American Chemical Society) did that to me.

Odd thing was, I wasn't on any of their mailing lists.

Which would explain why they didn't register a tracking pixel for a long time.

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