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Comment by chris_j | Hacker News Reader

I received a similar email a few months ago. I was rather annoyed to receive it, to be honest, because I had been reading the emails. Just with images disabled.

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Hey, I'm on the marketing team at Fab. We figured for us this would be an edge case since our emails are made up almost entirely of images.

Are there samples of the emails mentioned here I can view, without signing up? It would be easier to make informed statements on this thread that way.

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.

Here is an example of our emails, http://cdn.splatf.com/w/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/fab-email..., it is from a while ago but the layout is the same. As you can see we are a very visual company. The emails mirror the site so you can use that as a reference too. Again very visual and "not easily replaced".

Soon - Just added to metascribe.com (just hit MVP - designed to cover exactly this scenario: To preview a list before deciding to signup)

Well, that's a great way to get me not to read your mail ;-)

I thought that was a good joke.

You're being almost too polite. Fab's mails utterly pointless without the images.

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.

You're annoyed that a company wanted to try to not spam you?

I am reminded of xkcd... http://xkcd.com/1172/

No. He's annoyed that a company tried to automatically detect whether or not he was reading the e-mail and got it wrong. The only thing worse than having to manually do something is to have it automatically done wrong for you.

Perhaps the solution here is to include an "opt back in" link to that email.

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 last line of the email does appear to be "click HERE to opt back in"

Is there a way to detect whether user has read an email with the standard Gmail image filter enabled?

Facebook does a "trick" by playing an empty sound file.

http://pandodaily.com/2012/03/06/facebook-knows-when-you-ope...

Interesting, but that is a hack for IE / Outlook, not the GMail image filters.

That should be a violation of the CFAA... charge Zuckerberg with ~300 billion counts

Where I work we run a batch job that looks for inbound clicks from an email without a corresponding "email opened" tracking pixel being fired. Gives us an idea of how many people are engaging with images turned off or some other form of tracking pixel blocking.

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.

Could you share any rough statistics?

No, sorry.

On my list of about 11,500, just under 400 people have "opened never" but have clicked at least one link. So it's a pretty small number. I'd be you can just about double it to get the total number of opens that haven't been tracked.

Not unless they click a link.

The reason the image filter exists is to prevent this.

I would consider it a bug if there was.

Click tracking on links. Obviously, it only works if your users click.

It seems likely that clicks would be factored into the logic as well, I wonder if they ever stop emailing people that never click / buy / other action.

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