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The life and death of email read tracking
- PaulHoule 6y agoThis is in the top 10% of marketing communications where you are breaking bad news but modelling integrity. A herald of an age where privacy is a feature, not a bug.
- gruez 6y ago>For instance, sales people live and die in their email clients. One really useful feature for them is read tracking. You send an email to a prospect, that person quickly follows up saying they are not interested, but 3 months later, they reopen that same email, you get a live read notification, you instantly take your phone and follow up. You win. [...] >Now, if the love letter author inserted a pixel tracker, they can know every single time you did go back to that email, and read it again and again. Not cool. How is the first example any less creepy than the second example?
- grawprog 6y ago>How is the first example any less creepy than the second example? It's not. The whole concept of 'read receipts/tracking' in general, whether it's email or messaging or whatever is starting to get to me. I've never actually heard of a positive use for them and I know they've personally caused me stress before as well as people I know and people's stories i've read. I honestly can't see the desirability about a feature that allows you to see when others have read your message. Even in your examples, they cause stress, the marketer and the love letter writer are stressed waiting, the person receiving the letter if they knew reads were being tracked would be stressed. It really creates a strange conversation dynamic and the more communication methods that have it, the more uncomfortable I find communicating to be.
- plehoux 6y agoI'm the author, I totally agree.
- bluGill 6y agoRead tracking is very useful when you deal with people who don't check their email. I know some old people who "got hacked", and as a result they are scared of email and won't check it unless called and told of something important. (emailing semi-private pictures and directions is often useful)
- tuatoru 6y agoInstead of using this creepy surveillance technique, how about calling them to ask if they read your email?
- dvtrn 6y ago"Telephone anxiety", is a thing, as I've come to learn recently about some of my cohorts when I'd ask this very question: "did you call and ask this person for the follow-up you're claiming they haven't given you in three days?" I had no clue-now I'm not going to press the matter and push the person into it, yet at the same time here we're sitting on a decision being left open by one person, and not being acted on at all by another. Makes for some interesting manager decisions, it does.
- samatman 6y agoTelephone anxiety is easy to create. Take a kid, who has a phone, and a peer group with elaborate customs around using it, which include never, ever calling someone without texting first. Maybe your best friend and main squeeze, as a special privilege. Then the parent insists the child pick up the phone whenever they call. Also, there are spam calls, and the occasional genuine emergency. Presto, the phone ringing is automatically Bad News, and as the child grows to adulthood, they associate phone calls with trouble, and subconsciously feel like an aggressive, bad person, if they have to make one.
- naniwaduni 6y agoAnd they're right. Phone calls are, after all, even more aggressively demanding that someone else's attention be, right now, dedicated to dealing with you than any tracker.
- defterGoose 6y agoThe reason is that it increases expectations without a concurrent increase in agency. People tend to describe this dynamic as "always-connected" or something similar, but that verbiage really just scratches the surface of the underlying mechanics. At it's heart, it's all about trying to increasingly make "your time" into "my time", and that's not fair if you go back to our basic assumptions about what makes us human and why freedom is important. Almost every dystopian sci-fi novel includes the theme of humans in some way being enslaved to machines, and this dynamic is the beginning of just such a thing. Here, the machine is not yet a machine but rather another person, but the outcome is the same; it starts to become a form of "attention slavery".
- unphased 6y agoIt makes me think about how we see this sort of thing actually becoming possible with YouTube. Soon algorithms will be able to create stuff that will be sufficiently entertaining. Dreadful. I mean, I've already spent nearly half an hour looking at zooming into the mandelbrot fractal. But... that's different...
- nebalee 6y ago> I honestly can't see the desirability about a feature that allows you to see when others have read your message. When placing an order via email it's really useful to get an automatic confirmation that the order has been read.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hammock 6y agoDoes this even work for most clients, e.g. gmail and outlook? My understanding is gmail preloads the images (aka pixels) to their server before you even open. And outlook will cache the image after the first open so it won't fire back to the server after that.
- jedimastert 6y agoYou can also tell Gmail not to open images at all until you hit a button saying so
- SamBam 6y agoIf they really cared, they'd made it simple to default to showing images from people in your contacts, and not otherwise. However, because they're in bed with the advertisers, they make it so you either choose a degrading email experience for all your emails, or allow yourself to be tracked.
- hammock 6y agoThis comment misses the mark a bit. Gmail actually competes with spam emailers - then run their own ads inside your inbox and would rather you click on those. They also sort promotions and spam out of your primary inbox pretty robustly.
- user5994461 6y agoWorking in a large corporation I can confirm that it doesn't work. Outlook blocks all images and external content by default. There is a button somewhere to unlock the email but you'd never click that for spam.
- PenguinCoder 6y agoMost users here wouldn't, but plenty of enterprise users do. And also have active content allowed if not explicitly denied by a GPO.
- 6y ago
- mindslight 6y agoWhen the situation is more personal, it's harder to suppress the cognitive dissonance of invading someone's personal space (their email client). By adding the business context, it's easier to justify it as likely being a work only email account, etc.
- pirsquare 6y ago"but 3 months later, they reopen that same email, you get a live read notification" It doesn't work for gmail users. Tracking pixel will only be fired the first time the email is opened. After that, images will be served via google proxy servers. Source: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html
- parliament32 6y agoI doubt they'd cache an image for 3 months or longer.
- jerrygoyal 6y agonope, not sure about the gmail proxy servers but you get alerts everytime user opens the mail. speaking from first hand experience.
- pirsquare 6y agoThat happens if email is opened via clients like Thunderbird. For gmail, image will be served via google proxy servers.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- egypturnash 6y agoYeah holy shit I was immediately struck by how creepy that first example was.
- kube-system 6y ago> How is the first example any less creepy than the second example? Love is a much more personal and private topic than a b2b capital expense.
- renewiltord 6y agoWell, mostly because many of us want the guy to reach out to us most of the time in the first case. I respond to practically every email quite rapidly and for ones I'm not interested in I just push it off. At some later time, I might need the sales guy at short notice and I always reach out to the same guy. Or maybe I just want to cultivate a link so that I have the connection later so I give him the lead when I would otherwise go random.
- t0mmyb0y 6y agoThank you for doing away with this.
- mschuster91 6y agoWhat many people don't know: there exists an opt-in feature for read receipts, built right into all major email clients.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jedimastert 6y agoDoes it work the same for all clients?
- mschuster91 6y agoFor Outlook and Thunderbird yes, I am not sure about the support in Apple Mail and webmail clients.
- BrandoElFollito 6y agoThis does not apply to tracking pixels - the technology used here is completely different. What you mention is the ability for your email client to send a "that email was read" message when you send an email with such a request.
- ViViDboarder 6y agoYes. They are saying that if people really wanted to tell you when they open your email, they could enable it. However, they don’t. Throwing tracking pixels in are really a means to circumvent the wish of the recipient.
- Belphemur 6y agoThe default setting for such feature is to ask the user. It makes the whole interaction more creepy, moreover, I don't think that a lot of webclient support it (or even Smartphone apps). It's kind of a dying feature.
- oarsinsync 6y ago
- jrockway 6y agoDidn't most email providers kill these off years ago? I thought they just cached the images as soon as the email arrived, and showed you the cached version each time you opened the message.
- AdriaanvRossum 6y agoNope, but here is how to block them [1] [1] https://mashable.com/article/how-to-block-email-pixel-tracking/ https://mashable.com/article/how-to-block-email-pixel-tracki...
- jrockway 6y agoI see. So they're just proxying the request for the image, instead of caching it. That prevents the tracking image from learning your IP, receiving cookies, etc. but still gives the tracker that binary "did they see it" signal. I guess I'm disabling images in email. I thought email providers would have closed this obvious privacy disaster... but nope.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoPrivacy-oriented email providers tend to block remote images by default[1]. Ad companies that provide free email services generally do not, because the users of tracking pixels are often their advertising customers. [1] Fastmail also has a "middle-ground" option to show remote images if it's from someone in your contacts, if you want a way to filter it dynamically a bit. I leave mine on a straight block, but if you really hate seeing "ugly" emails, it's a nice option.
- robertlagrant 6y agoThat's a bad idea, because it shows spammers which email addresses are valid.
- jrockway 6y agoThat already happens. When I ran my own email server, I didn't reject invalid addresses because that was the anti-spam advice at the time (whether or not it worked, I don't know; most of my email was still spam). But that doesn't appear to be what providers like Gmail are doing; they are happy to tell you that an address is invalid. It is somewhat important to human users for the mail server to tell you the address is invalid. (An example: many years ago I interviewed at Google. Some time during the process, my recruiter left. I found this out by sending them an email and getting a message about the address being invalid. I then complained on HN, someone followed up, and I worked there for many years!)
- aloukissas 6y agoThanks for doing this. Love seeing privacy coming up front and center. FYI- if you're using web-based email (e.g. Gmail), a browser extension like PixelBlock will zap most shady trackers. I would love it if there was a Hey-like mobile client for Gmail (and other email providers). It's still hard to block this tracking on mobile.
- C1sc0cat 6y agoThough this does mean internet RFC822 email doesn't have non repudiation functionality built in.
- AdriaanvRossum 6y agoTry using Lockdown for iOS [1] or Blokada for Android [2] to block trackers. [1] https://lockdownhq.com/ https://lockdownhq.com/ [2] https://blokada.org/ https://blokada.org/
- g_p 6y agoIf you're on Android, FairEmail is worth a look, as a mail client that thinks about privacy. There's blocking of images by default, as well as an option to safely render basic HTML without having to parse full HTML email (if you don't like that). Also has some detection of common tracking parameters or redirect services for hyperlinks, and lets you remove these automatically before visiting a link. Not as shiny as Hey for sure, and a more technically focused email app, but if you want something privacy oriented, it's good and supports IMAP/SMTP nicely. Open source too, which is always nice. Not affiliated, just a happy user for a few years.
- frob 6y agoI just go for the bazooka approach and block every single image in my Gmail and only load them on a case-by-case basis. I've been paranoid about email tracking ever since I first saw my father insert a read-receipt via Outlook into a work email sometime in the late 90s or early aughts.
- folmar 6y agoWhy would you load them? I have image blocking in Thunderbird since forever and never had a reason to load a single one.
- _jal 6y agoI've noticed several mailing lists send me "you're not reading our mail, we're going to unsubscribe you" messages because I don't allow my MUA to spy for them. Fixed; created a cron job to curl relevant tracking pixels once a month.
- arbitrage 6y agoA long, long time ago, I had a boss who was nutso about this stuff. One day, he comes to me, and tell me to turn on read-receipts. "Sure thing, boss." I let it work for a few days, then turn it off. Turn it back on before he comes to check why it isn't working. "Gee, boss, I dunno. I don't even notice that, now." He goes away to 'think' about it. I keep it on for a few weeks. Then I turn it off, for the last time. I never heard from that PHB on that subject ever again. Read receipts aren't something people ACTUALLY want. It's something they want to want. Or want you to want. Either way, nobody actually wants that unless you're trying to externalize your coping strategies onto those around you, which is maladaptive and very no bueno.
- reaperducer 6y agoI'm not sure why you're being downvoted for relating your personal experience. I had an almost identical conversation with my boss, with similar results.
- hobs 6y agoIt's a sign your boss doesn't have enough actual stuff to do, and so is managing your time like you are a child. I imagine some of the downvoters are mad that the person used an indirect means instead of a direct one, but people like this don't respond to saying "no, this is a dumb idea" very well.
- reaperducer 6y agoIt's a sign your boss doesn't have enough actual stuff to do, and so is managing your time like you are a child. Yep. That was exactly her. And why she was in the first batch shown the door when the COVID cuts came.
- polyrand 6y agoI've been using Trocker (https://trockerapp.github.io https://trockerapp.github.io) for some time already and sometimes I get surprised by how many emails contain read-tracking.
- jerrygoyal 6y agothis. I was about to add comment about trocker. I always install these 3 blockers in my browser: ub origin, privacy badger, and trocker.
- sys_64738 6y agoI had an incident with Capital One sending me a letter in the mail saying that I hadn't read any email correspondence and they thought my email address was invalid. I have display images disables in Gmail.
- chinathrow 6y agoSome mail delivery systems unsubscribe folks from (legitimate) distribution lists/newsletters once they determine that tracking pixels are not loaded for a while. People implenting and using such a feature (from the sender side) should be fired on the spot.
- rtx 6y agoThis is mostly driven by Gmail and Outlooks spam filters.
- mobjack 6y agoI implemented such a feature and thought it was a good thing as we don't want to send marketing emails to those who aren't interested. People will also enter in junk email addresses so it is to clear them out to keep your list clean. Those who are interested in the email content and still have images turned off are rare in practice. Even then, I also checked for email clicks and logins for some redundancy.
- prepend 6y ago> Those who are interested in the email content and still have images turned off are rare in practice. How do you know this? Maybe you keep kicking them off your list and are misinterpreting your signal. What percentage of your addresses never phone home? I think this is the point of the post as people assume this functionality works and make decisions. It seems like a low cost to maintain people who subscribed but never loaded a tracker image. Not sure your product, but I think people who turn on this feature are savvier than some users. So pruning them from your list would remove potentially lucrative customers. I think this availability bias of data leads companies to doing some weird, suboptimal things. Like using Facebook in place of market research leaves out non-Facebook users, etc etc.
- csilverman 6y agoGood riddance. Anecdotal, but I noticed a definite change in the tone of sales emails I was getting after I turned off images in Gmail. When they could tell I was reading their garbage but not responding, there was a lot of "tell me why you aren't interested" and "just a fifteen-minute call, just fifteen minutes we swear" and "please just talk to me, why won't you talk to me?" They saw I was opening the emails—at this point, if I see something bold, I tap it without thinking—so they thought they had a chance, and they were really obnoxious. I finally switched off images. After they stopped being able to tell if I was seeing their stuff, they got a little less pushy; they couldn't be sure I'd gotten their first email, so they focused more on re-explaining their product than trying to guilt me into reacting to them. (I'm a little more understanding of people who use these to determine how much dead weight their mailing list has. Especially if you're an indie creator, you don't want to be paying for the 20% of people who might not be reading your newsletter. I don't mind a "please let us know if you're reading our newsletter" email as long as they're not obnoxious about it.)
- stingraycharles 6y agoIt’s most likely drip marketing systems at work, and no human was ever involved. They are just systems that respond to certain triggers, such as “read 3 emails without answering”. So right now you’re hindering the algorithm of making these decisions, which leads to more generic emails. Consider it the email equivalent to blocking cookies. :)
- phreeza 6y agoI always thought gmail requests the images whether you open the email or not since they moved to the image proxy in 2015 or so.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoI too recall hearing this, but email tracking definitely still works in Gmail, and Google, being the advertising and marketing king, has no incentive to upset their actual customers by defeating email tracking. (In fact, AMP4Email, a.k.a. "Dynamic Email", will probably make this even worse.) I suspect the thing we heard about means Gmail is messing up the IP address/location tracking aspect of a tracking pixel, but still loading it on email opens. The bargain of "we'll hide the user's IP, but still allow you to track their behavior" sounds like the devil's bargain I'm used to from them.
- dx87 6y agoSetting Thunderbird to default to only loading plaintext has been great for discovering sites that use trackers. Sometimes I'll sign up for a weekly newsletter, read it, but the hidden tracking isn't loaded. Inevitably, I'll get an email a few months later with instructions for unsubscribing since their tracking isn't showing that I read any of the emails.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jonpurdy 6y ago> You send an email to a prospect, that person quickly follows up saying they are not interested, but 3 months later, they reopen that same email, you get a live read notification, you instantly take your phone and follow up. You win. This is awful and precisely the reason I set my mail clients to not open remote content by default since I started using email decades ago. If this exact situation occurred to me as a prospect, I would likely never deal with that company again.
- vmception 6y agoGDPR killed read tracking, go EU! Keep flexing as a 27-30 nation bloc! You are built for the 21st century when no other union, regulatory body or country consensus system is!
- gingerlime 6y agoI wish it was the case, but quite far from it... pretty much all companies that email me keep tracking. I even asked Backblaze —- one of the nicer companies I know —about it[0], but they refused to stop tracking me. [0] https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/why-is-backblaze-tracking-me/ https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/why-is-backblaze-tracking-m...
- vmception 6y agoreport them (or have your EU friends report them) so we get the case law quicker.
- engie 6y agoRead tracking is a feature of many/most popular chat clients (certainly hangouts, messenger & whatsapp), and anecdotally it seems to be valuable. Of course, everyone would love to see the read status of other people yet be able to control their own read state (there are endless browser extensions promising this for chat apps, a tremendous self compromise vector). Will it ever be possible to offer this in a federated system or will it be limited to the walled gardens?
- ohazi 6y ago> everyone would love to see the read status of other people yet be able to control their own read state This should just be a first-class, front-and-center feature already. Everybody plays this game. It's so stupid. Just let me skim my messages at midnight without signaling to co-workers that I'm up and that they should feel free to continue bothering me. Also better that other people do the same to me so I don't keep sitting there like an idiot waiting for a response that isn't going to come. Remember status messages? Available / away / idle? That you could set manually? Before Google Hangouts decided that everybody who owns a phone should just be green all the time, which EVERY OTHER CHAT APP decided to copy? So fucking stupid.
- rightbyte 6y agoYe ... you quickly forget how good things used to be. Remember talking in voice chat without SaaS anti-echo and -noise filter lag? Or not having everything spam my notice bar in Android so that I miss sms:es and missed calls? Things are getting out of hand shitty with these adcentered A/B big data UIs.
- dvtrn 6y ago* Remember status messages? Available / away / idle? That you could set manually?* Remember AIM away messages that would auto respond to friends with a custom message if you were logged in but AFK or even sitting at keyboard but wanted some quiet? I miss it. So much so that I’ve started writing an auto-responder for slack because despite having a “Presence”/Status feature that I use very judiciously (In a Meeting/On a call/Gone to Lunch/PTO) I’ve found-across multiple jobs-people barge right through them, then follow up with emails asking “are you available for a moment?” when I’m really trying and desiring focus (and also because I’m not signing up to someone else’s hosted SaaS service to do this).
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoUgly Email extension[1] can inform and block email tracking pixels on Gmail. [1]https://uglyemail.com/ https://uglyemail.com/
- kbuck 6y agoIronically, the Firefox version of this extension requests permissions to inspect all domains, not just Gmail -- indicating that the extension itself may be performing tracking. I can't tell offhand whether the Chrome version does the same.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoI can confirm that in chrome it accesses only gmail.com and in general we can set access permissions to extensions on Chrome[1], for Ugly Email I can see that accessing other domains are disabled by default. As for Firefox, the reviews seem to tell otherwise, it's not been updated for over 2 years (same for chrome as well). [1]https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/answer/2664769?p=enable_extensions&visit_id=637370330398019250-2679455428&rd=1#extensionpermissions https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/answer/2664769?p=...
- Sephr 6y agoNote that Google experimented with preventing read receipt tracking while allowing images to load, but eventually decided against it as it affected tracking data for their partners. ProtonMail claims to be working on a solution as of 2 years ago[1] but has not yet shipped anything in this domain. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17611361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17611361 (ProtonMail employee, responding to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17610732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17610732 )
- NicolasGorden 6y agoMarketing guy here. 75%-80% open rate for many of my campaigns tells me the title is misleading, those pixels are firing in all the major providers. Putting people in email/SMS funnels based on which emails they read is ENOURMOUSLY beneficial to my clients. This is something that's really very basic. Client Sells Widgets. He sends 3 emails to email base on small widgets, green widgets and cheap widgets. If the client opens one of these but not the other, does it not make sense to send further information that is relevant to their interest? I mean, if they open the green widgets email on my funnel, they will be getting A LOT MORE green widget emails because they will be moved from funnel to funnel based on their activity or lack thereof. Good email tracking is part of good marketing. Something I do see commonly is tech founders looking down on marketing. This leads to low budgets and attracting low quality candidates. Modern marketing tools are like machine guns. And most marketing people are like chimps. So that's why you see silly emails like 'I see you are opening my email, why don't you answer' - which is insane from a marketing point of view, why creep people out? So silly. Good open rate data gathering results in you not knowing that it's being tracked. You simply get more targeted stuff and less stuff that is outside your interest. Back in 01 when I started in digital marketing, good attribution of sales and marketing was something people spent 7 digits creating custom solutions. Now we can string a few SAAS providers together and get amazing details. It just needs to be set up intelligently. Having said all of this: of course I don't allow images to display by default on my email provider. But I'm privacy minded and most people aren't. Which is fine, the world is diverse and that's a good thing. I love choice.
- robertlagrant 6y agoYou're missing the point. Tracking gives you numbers, but they are not accurate numbers. Your clients think they're beneficial because they don't know the numbers aren't accurate. Building funnels on top of bad data is not impressive.
- NicolasGorden 6y agoAll data is inaccurate to some degree. This is not new. There are ways to mitigate false positives, and many of the best SAAS work tirelessly to constantly incorporate every new update and every new technique to try and correct data to make it as clean as possible. The techniques are many and I'm generally not on the cutting edge of that particular niche. But I know people who are. And it only has to be accurate enough to be profitable. If I get it right 80% of the time and increase CLV by 30% while increasing marketing costs by a small amount, that's an objective win. We're not sending people to Mars. And even then, every measurement has a margin of error. It's the inherent nature of measurements.
- iandanforth 6y agoI don't want you to be successful in this. Marketing is a blight, find something better to do with your time.
- NicolasGorden 6y ago> I don't want you to be successful in this I do wish you success. Life is great, I hope you find things that make you feel in the mood to wish well on others.
- beervirus 6y agoBeing spied upon doesn't put people in a good mood. If you want people to be in a good mood, you should stop doing that.
- NicolasGorden 6y agoI can see how you see other people being responsible for your moods. And how that makes you feel justified in attacking strangers online. The best day of my life was when I started taking responsibility for my own state of mind. I'll invite you to try it, for me it works really well in improving my life. I also invite you to join the EFF and EPIC to see if we can improve privacy legislation. I particularly like the work of EPIC. Again I wish you the best, truly.
- beervirus 6y agoMake a living spying on people, then smugly talk down to them when they don't appreciate being spied on. The only one attacking strangers online is the marketer who feels entitled to my data without my consent.
- NicolasGorden 6y ago> entitled to my data without my consent. How dare you. I never said I wanted your data without your consent. I've never emailed anyone who didn't sign up. I request you please not spread lies about me. I find it interesting that the people whose reaction is most viscerally anti marketing are the same who make up lies in their anti-marketing arguments.
- oblib 6y agoI 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.
- chinathrow 6y agoThe 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.
- dqv 6y agoI 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.
- oblib 6y agoIt wasn't a huge problem for the app's users, but it came up enough to make it worth implementing the feature.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoPresumably, 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. ;)
- luord 6y agoI believe that rule zero that every developer should follow is "fight for the users". This is a great example of such: Regardless of how useful it can be for certain businesses, the combination of unreliability with the potential for abuse just makes it a net negative experience for the users. And that it can save their company in the long run means that everyone wins. Or at least I hope so; they're doing the right thing.
- smileysteve 6y ago> Regardless of how useful it can be for certain businesses To expound; It's always easy to justify something for your case; but that doesn't make it ethical.
- anaganisk 6y agoOh you've got to be in one of those threads, where Googlers try to defend, how much efforts they put into what they're doing and how they know better about everything, and yet their browser and OS is a privacy nightmare.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoI recently got an email from a mailing list saying "goodbye" to me because I don't read their emails anymore. Of course, the catch is, I open their emails several times a week: I just block remote images. I replied back to them to tell them I don't appreciate them trying to track whether or not I open my mail in my inbox, but to keep me on the list. I could get upset and unsubscribe because I'm annoyed they're relying on tracking, though FWIW, my experience demonstrates their tracking isn't working. And hopefully, me directly communicating with them that their strategy is both ineffective and unappreciated may help nudge them away from this sort of behavior.
- stevenwliao 6y agoThey do this because they get penalized by email service companies for sending emails that people don't open, so they have to guess.
- bigiain 6y ago> because they get penalized by email service companies for sending emails that people don't open ... as measured by the exact same totally flawed technique the article at the top of this thread links too. :sigh: I guess for companies like, say, Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor or newsletter services like Tiny Letter - there's a big difference between a "maybe 70% accurate open rate of 50%" compared to a "maybe 70% accurate open rate of 0.1%", and the second should quite certainly be grounds for firing you as a customer. Sadly the "marketing automation" industry mostly likely think 0.1% open rates are acceptable and instead of firing that client instead recommend sending their email to 10 or 100 times as many email addresses is a great idea.
- mabbo 6y agoI worked at a startup (full of awesome people!) that, among other things, helped stock analysts track who was opening their publications (emails). It wasn't just about finding out when or where someone was opening it. It was about finding out who was forwarding these emails. Because there was a cost to be on this mailing list- if you're forwarding the contents, you're effectively pirating that information (I wave my hands a bit as I say this because there's a loooot of interpretation there and you are welcome to disagree). So if you send out your latest post to 500 (paying) customers, you could see- how many people read it? How many people came back and read it again later? And most importantly, how many different IP addresses were loading that tracking pixel? Oh, the tracking says the content I sent to John was opened by 1000 different people? Okay, John is off the list now. What made it better was that a lot of the content was graphical. So the 'tracking pixel' was the content itself. Short of downloading and forwarding the image, you couldn't share it without there being a record. The company wasn't what I wanted to do so I moved on pretty quickly- but it still strikes me how neat it all was. Edit later: Oh right, the other thing- you could tell what company the person who opened it was at by the IP Address, some of the time! "Hey, I didn't send it to anyone at <Company>, why the $%&* are they reading it?"
- creade 6y agoIf it only takes "a minimal amount of creativity ... to come up with scenarios where people can misuse read tracking" why did they build the feature in the first place?
- hiidrew 6y agoimo the best thing of Hey, the email client from bandcamp, was what seemed like their vendetta against spy pixels and other email tracking
- davidhehehe 6y agoIs there a way to always “read” as soon as you receive the email. Then you’ll be hiding in plain sight.
- jackall 6y agoSuperhuman seems to have encountered this last year and they disabled read receipts by default: - https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681655/superhuman-email-app-spying-controversy-policy-change-read-receipts https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681655/superhuman-email-... - https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681655/superhuman-email-app-spying-controversy-policy-change-read-receipts https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681655/superhuman-email-...
- julianlam 6y agoEmail is a fickle technology, what with the state of anti-spam technology and SPF records, and DKIM, etc... The odds of an email going through really aren't as certain as they were 20 years ago! That said, we use tracking pixels in our support ticket system because we often do have certain clients who simply can't receive email from Zendesk for whatever reason. The read receipt gives us a positive signal that they received it, or conversely if we _don't_ see a read receipt, it's a low quality signal that maybe they didn't receive our response.
- Justsignedup 6y agoHmmm. I wonder if it is legally possible to sue any company/recruiter who sends you emails with a tracking pixel. Since you have not accepted any EULA you can claim surveillance. And depending on the state, if you were not aware of the surveillance it is illegal. It is stretching an idea, but I want this to happen to stop them.
- jjav 6y agoOne of the so many reasons I use mutt for email. These problems don't exist.
- clement_b 6y agoWhat about click tracking from email? This is more reliable (server side) and a stronger signal of interest. Of course, you only track clickers and might have false positives if mail clients follow links for some reason but I doubt they do from the data I personally use (Mandrill click tracking). Also, there is a user action which makes tracking a bit less dirty, but still, not opt-in.
- type0 6y agoI could never understand how it became so popular to obtrusively track email reading. 70% of the time it works all the time! You know what, we could prevent maybe like over 75% of all domestic violence by installing surveillance cameras in every home, good idea right?
- edem 6y agoI adopted a strict need to do policy when it comes to any kind of non-personal communication online. I have zero notifications, I don't open 99% of my email, I just delete them and I certainly don't open anything twice once I'm done with them, I just archive them. I have 12 items in my inbox right now. I also apply this to my phone, and my other desktop stuff. I can live my life more or less like in the '90s. I didn't even know that this feature existed until now because I just annihilate anything that even remotely looks like spam or ad. Another thing I do is I disable javascript on any site where I see anything I don't like (like popups) and if it doesn't work it goes on my personal blocklist and I never see that site again.