Fab stops sending you emails you don’t read, even when you don’t ask them to
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
http://pandodaily.com/2012/03/06/facebook-knows-when-you-ope...
Our analytics wizards then use that and other data to come up with some estimates on how many users are opening our emails with images disabled.
I would consider it a bug if there was.
In general, marketing emails that are mostly images get binned by me. It's especially great when the only text is "unsubscribe" -- easy to find!
If the images really are important, and not easily replaced with text then I could understand your position easily.
I normally hate email with lots of images and prefer plain text over HTML, but in this particular case anyone claiming to read your emails with the images off is just trolling.
I am reminded of xkcd... http://xkcd.com/1172/
Actually, it would be better to change the frequency (slow them down) of your mailouts to that person with the option to request a return to the old frequency.
The solution to inbox clutter is filtering. If users are too lazy to make filters, then the problem is with the effort required to make filters.
But I think the fact that users opt-in to HTML emails and engage with them far more frequently than text opt-in and engagement indicates that your opinion is an outlier.
I like HTML email. I opt-in only to companies that interest me enough to do so. Those times when I'm opted-in accidentally by not unchecking a box or whatever during checkout I just unsubscribe from and move on. What I have left is useful content in my inbox, some of it more directly sales oriented, the rest more generally informational.
Similarly, for certain senders, I chose to tell Gmail to always load their images — including tracking pixels. It's not a violation of my privacy any more than the numerous pixels on any other website I read.
HTML mail itself is a security problem. It has been used for fairly sophisticated phishing attacks in the past:
http://blog.mxlab.eu/2010/03/13/phishing-emails-with-attache...
It is almost certainly being used for phishing attacks now. It makes it difficult to give users visual cues about which emails can be trusted, since the sender could have embedded HTML in the message to present that same queue. An attacker might give the user the idea that a message was digitally signed by using HTML mail.
Security with HTML mail is a serious enough concern that the DoD will sometimes convert all incoming HTML mail to plaintext as a precaution:
http://it.slashdot.org/story/06/12/24/1922216/department-of-...
"It's not a violation of my privacy any more than the numerous pixels on any other website I read."
In other words, it is a violation of your privacy. The fact that it is a common practice on the web does not somehow make it less of a violation.
So...the web at large violates people's privacy. I can agree to that, but I prefer a world where everyone has easy access to large amounts of information.
If the available communication mediums are only those that are secure but difficult to use, then the ecosystems of many sites would be much smaller. I can't imagine trying to browse Facebook or Yelp over a TOR connection. It's feasible but annoying to me. That tells me most of my friends and family would simply consider this process unfeasible and not use it.
While Tor is fairly annoying for most people (even myself), other privacy-protecting systems are less annoying. I have yet to hear someone complain about using ABP, which I would classify as privacy protecting (it blocks a large number of common tracking systems). I suspect nobody would complain about Firefox blocking tracking cookies by default either.
Really, we can live in a world where privacy is respected if we are willing to do so and willing to deploy the necessary technologies. One of my side projects is to develop a system that allows targeted ads to be delivered in a privacy-preserving fashion, so that advertisers can know which ads are successful without knowing whether any individual person actually viewed or clicked on their ads (using cryptographic techniques). My point is that there is no need to violate privacy and that better technologies can be developed and deployed.
The web today has far more information and functionality than ever before. Much of this free to me because of advertising.
You act like the advertisers some how force things down your throat. If you don't want to deal with advertising, the answer is simple: Avoid websites that rely on advertising dollars.
Or plan B: ABP.
You feel entitled enough to just take what you want from a website while they pay the cost for your traffic.
Well, go ahead with that. And justify yourself with your "greedy advertisers ruined everything and violate my privacy" BS.
Feel free to have the last word here.
Obviously this isn't because of the nice sites with good content which just want to make some money from their effort, it's generally because of less legitimate sites. But I think the idealogical argument of "these content providers deserve to get paid" just falls into irrelevance for these people when the alternative is protecting their computers, privacy, safety online, and of course their time.
As an ABP user who uses it mainly to make my internet experience nicer, I can take the time to unblock websites which I agree I should be supporting or reimbursing somehow for the content they have provided me, but most people would never take the time to do this, and for them the best solution seems to me to be blocking all ads where possible.
Are you serious? I can assure you that I have opted in to receive email, even HTML email, and so have nearly all my friends.
And the solution is to teach users about phishing. That's the only sane route, it's what everybody is doing and, by the way, and it mostly works (despite some ISPs, governments and banks trying hard to teach people that they must click on every unreliable warning).
> An attacker might give the user the idea that a message was digitally signed by using HTML mail.
That's a bug in your reader.
For most users email is something you do in a web browser. They've never used it any other way.
We manage lists with an aggregate about 1 million people who have all explicitly ticket checkboxes that were not checked by default and/or explicitly gone into their user account and added mailing lists on various sites we operate for clients.
That you even doubt that people are truly opting in just reinforce how much of an outlier you are.
The filter side can always be better, sure, but HTML is tremendously successful and it only annoys a tiny minority. It's not going anywhere, accepting this will create less cognitive dissonance for yourself.
Ultimately, I think filtering is going to win. The problems with HTML mail are going to become more severe, not less. Phishing attacks are becoming more and more of a problem, and HTML mail makes phishing attacks much easier to carry out. The sort of tracking that Fab used to detect who was actually reading their mail could just as easily be used to identify potential targets for scams, or in a coordinated attack of some kind. We cannot continue to leave ourselves open to such attacks -- eventually we are going to have to start blocking HTML mail or at least blocking external images/etc. Filters that are good enough to reduce clutter are already starting to be deployed e.g. GMail's Priority Inbox, and GMail already blocks external images by default.
| HTML mail is a terrible thing that should be stopped
http://blog.mxlab.eu/2010/03/13/phishing-emails-with-attache...
Even more sophisticated attacks could be imagined. Suppose you train users to look for a digital signature check; an HTML message could be used to create something that looks like such a check, tricking people into believing they received a signed message. The sort of monitoring used to unsubscribe Fab's readers could have been used to determine when people are at their desks in a particular office, or who is more likely to read a scam message.
It is a no-brainer: HTML mail allows the sender of a message to render things of their choosing on your screen, and potentially execute code they have written on your computer (similar things can be said about the web; the difference is that setting up a website is useless if nobody visits it, but with email you get to send someone the message without waiting for them to request it). There are other complaints about HTML mail, but the security angle is biggest in my opinion.
Yes. Really, yes.
Please, if you offer email please also offer plain text email.
Lesson learned.. if I do it again, I won't send the mail telling people I have ;-)
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ywa/faqs/tracking/advtrack/...
Also, I am in a minority with this, but when I receive an HTML message without any plaintext portion I delete it; if it is an unsolicited message I mark it as spam.
ReadNotify (as reviewed by jgrahamc[2]) also seems to use similar tricks, including loading remote resources via css url() and similar.
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-uses-bgsound-to-...
I'm in the process of moving my e-mail to Sailthru. I'm really impressed by their capabilities, though the transition hasn't been quite as smooth as I would have liked. I'm finally starting to dive into doing stuff like this, and I'm really excited about using data to improve the experience from people who get my daily e-mails.
Not only can I stop bothering people who are no longer reading my e-mails, but I can also cut costs by removing users who aren't engaged. It's a win-win.
| removing users who aren't engaged
One good thing about Sailthru is that it you can track all clicks on links. So if you have a user with no opens and no clicks over a few months, you have a lot more certainty that they're not reading (especially if your e-mails have a considerable amount of links).
There is a whole argument about how even if you don't open emails, just seeing the name of the company in your inbox increases recall value so tomorrow when you do have a need for a pair of shoes, you'll more likely check out the company that's been emailing you daily than a company you haven't heard about much.
I am not one of your biggest fans.
If your not on Amazon SES paying tiny 10 cent CPMs, then there is some financial incentive to throttle your sending back a bit too.
The reason you send an email is for people who don't turn on images or click on links, but still want your newsletter.
It also has the nice benefit of publicity and reduced mailchimp/other provider fees.
On second thought, I'm not sure if any of these would offset the cost per acquisition of even a few users who were accidentally "let go" by this tactic. I hope fab posts some statistics at some point.
I wonder where Fab landed in this discussion.
Basically, it's best practice to auto-unsubscribe users who never open their e-mails to reduce risk of being marked as spam after a while.
The tracking is already happening. Put it to good use!
I've found that nearly everything I do with email works better this way.
Fact is, Email Deliverability is increasingly engagement-driven these days, especially with the major ISPs, and additionally sending email costs money.
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At its most basic level, a sender's 'spamminess' is determined by percentage of spam reports against overall deliveries from that IP. Levels over 1% put your reputation in the 'severe' category, and risk lack of inbox delivery, blacklists and more. Having more engaged users leads to a better ratio - for this reason alone keeping your recipients 'fresh' is valuable.
Additionally, another common pattern of email (or more correctly a sender:template combination) falling into the 'spam' category for an ISP is to see a few percentage points in drop, followed by a complete /dev/null-ing. When the initial drop happens, whether or not your recipients correct that as a false-positive will determine whether you get the Full Monty. Naturally therefore removing the least engaged users has a significant beneficial effect on overall deliverability.
These days though, it's getting more complex, nuanced and ultimately more individual.
Gmail moved some time back from a centralized concept of 'spam' to a much more personal view by using your positive and negative engagement signals: opens, clicks, replies, 'delete without reading','report spam' etc. They explicitly modify the visibility of email in your personal inbox through the 'important' flag (http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...), but there is good evidence that negative engagement can carry an email all the way to the spam box for a given user and consequently affect the overall deliverability.
This has a strong benefit for Gmail in that they become much harder to 'game' - something Google Search team also has plenty of experience in avoiding. They essentially eschew the classic SMTP 5xx return codes for 'Accept All, Ask Questions Later' in all but the most egregious cases, and provide little to no feedback for senders to troubleshoot delivery problems on the basis that if your users want your mail, it would be getting through.
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The second primary motivator here (still with me?) is that sending email also has a non-zero cost which is almost entirely driven by sheer subscriber count and delivery attempts.
Consider a typical mass-marketing email with a 10-15% open rate, delivered multiple times a month. Even assuming a varied engagement profile that mailer is engaging with at most 50% of their list over the month. A simple list of 1MM recipients would incur an increased cost of a couple of thousand dollars a month to send into the vacuum of disinterest.
There is, in certain circumstances, a benefit to be gained from 'eyeballs on subjects' for brand awareness, but that metric is near impossible to track, and as mentioned above unopened emails can be deleterious to your overall delivery to the more engaged segments.
For both the reasons highlighted above, mass-market email has been using the 're-engagement' method (breathlessly described in the OP as a customer-driven action), to keep their lists fresh and costs down.
I do applaud the application of metrics to provide intelligent subscription management. At PostageApp we see the best delivery rates come from our clients who take active interest in the concept of humans at the end of the SMTP pipe. The growing provision of engagement data through APIs is helping drive solutions like FAB's, and the end result is a better experience for the user. That said, this particular innovation came not from the consumer-friendly high visibility consumer and SaaS markets, but has been around for many years in the risk-heavy line treading bulk marketing industry.