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Comment by razemio | Hacker News Reader

"They opened our email 73 times, but didn’t respond."

This counter does not work right? I know it is a minor thing, but I immediately stopped reading further. I have a problem...

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Right, especially with Apple.

Apple's Protect Mail Activity feature, which is on by default, "opens" all emails received on a server, to hide the user's IP address. This causes emails with tracker pixels to be falsely reported as read.

For a while, I was confused why all of my GitHub notifications were being marked as read!

https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/14604379978667376...

Later on they said they use Mailtrack [0]. I looked at their FAQ and they just use a tracking pixel. I don't really think that mail clients in a coorporate environment (i.e. Apple) download external images automatically. Mailtrack seems to be confident, that only 5-10% of recipients aren't "trackable" [1], but I haven't seen a mail client that by default downloads external media in a while.

[0] https://mailtrack.io [1] https://mailtrack.io/hc/en-us/articles/360005941037-Why-is-M...

See my peer comment: Apple Mail really does download external images automatically, on a server to hide your IP address. It then rewrites those emails to reference the cached images from the server. Every tracker pixel sent to a mail account with this feature will be counted as read, whether or not the user opens it.

Gmail does that too, no? I remember an HN discussion on this many years ago.

Here, I found a corroborating link from 2013: https://www.litmus.com/blog/gmail-adds-image-caching-what-yo...

Ah I didn't see that one, they mention this on another page [0] (scroll a bit down). But they mention also that it still reliably detects views and that google released a new feature a while ago "dynamic email", which automatically loads but can also be disabled.

[0] https://mailtrack.io/blog/google-email-tracking-gmail/

Maybe my knowledge about Mail clients is a bit skewed, because I'm using open source Mail clients on every platform (Thunderbird, K-9 Mail, Evolution), and they always block External content by default. But I thought this was the standard today, but I guess loading them on the server is a bit more UX friendly instead of blocking remote content, although I wouldn't want it.

The Windows Mail app still does this by default. And I know folks that use it over the thick Outlook in corporate environments. (Yikes, I know.)

Email pixel tracking is an industry standard these days. Every time the email loads the pixel, it counts +1.

Some platforms like Gmail partially obfuscate it.

I am totally out of the loop when it comes to these things. My client always opens in plain text or html render with JS and external content disabled. I believe this is true for most clients. On the other hand security scanners, browsers engines and other Middleware stuff can trigger such a counter without any user interaction if I am not mistaken.

The pixel is just an image, so unless you disable email images loading by default, the server will still count you.

Pre-caching will sometimes mess with the counters though, making the counts lower than the actual.

I understand. The last 3 email clients I used do not load images by default (that what's included in external sources [previous comment]).

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