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Delivery rates, AKA staying out of spam and getting into the inbox are correlated to subscriber engagement on your emails. The more often subscribers open + cl

Delivery rates, AKA staying out of spam and getting into the inbox are correlated to subscriber engagement on your emails. The more often subscribers open + click a link, the more likely the mail server will let it in the inbox. If you blast 10,000 emails, and noone clicks or engages with your email - you'll kill your domain's delivery rate. One of the methods email marketers use to keep their email delivery rates high is by removing subscribers that don't engage with their email. Preventing email tracking prevents marketers from removing uninterested or unengaged subscribers from their lists.

bjustin 5y ago
Clicking links doesn't sound like the sort of thing that email servers would know about one way or the other. Likewise for engaging (or not) with emails at all. What setup do you have in mind where this is the case? Given that AFAIK Apple Mail downloads entire messages regardless of whether they're opened, Apple's change here doesn't seem likely to affect delivery rates in this way anyway.
- Nullabillity 5y ago
  > Likewise for engaging (or not) with emails at all. What setup do you have in mind where this is the case? If you use IMAP (or basically anything else than POP) then your email client reports the read status back to the server.
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    Your IMAP server doesn't report read status back to the sender. Unless your e-mail provider is an advertiser *cough* Google *cough* the advertiser doesn't know if you read a message just because the IMAP server marked it as read. Also an IMAP server's read status doesn't mean someone manually interacted with an e-mail. If you mark messages as read in bulk, even if the provider reported that status to an advertiser, says nothing about engagement.
    - jcranmer 5y ago
      You can request a read receipt with emails, which will cause the MUA to send an email saying you've read the message (although I suspect most clients default to asking you if you want to send it before doing so).
      - dsr_ 5y ago
        In the MUAs which have read receipt functionality, all of them let the end user turn it off. Even MS Outlook.
        Nextgrid 5y ago
        Which is how it should be - the fact the user can choose to decline is a feature.
  - bjustin 5y ago
    Not sure how I forgot un/read status syncs via IMAP. Thanks.
toxik 5y ago
This could be done without duping the receiver’s email client into revealing that the email has been viewed.
hermanradtke 5y ago
> One of the methods email marketers use to keep their email delivery rates high is by removing subscribers that don't engage with their email. Email marketers can still track when a user clicks a link, which is the proper signal for them to be using anyways.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  You get what you measure, so relying solely on clicks to measure interest is going to drive email products toward more clickbait designs and content—reversing a nice trend over the last few years to put most/all of the content into the email itself.
zzo38computer 5y ago
I think that it would be better using NNTP and plain text, and then these problems are avoided anyways. Then the sender need not keep track of these things or to worry about the things that you mentioned, I think. Also can be good to include the text in the message if you can do and not usually needing a link, you can then access it even if you are not connected to the internet, too. (I use email software that is not even capable of HTML email, and I don't want HTML email.)
- beagle3 5y ago
  Outlook killed NNTP 20 years ago by virtue of not supporting it (every other mail client at the time did). it also suffered as a discussion medium because of the decentralized unauthenticated measure, for sure - I don’t think the global hierarchy would have done much better than it did. But two companies I was consulting for around 2000 had very effective NNTP internal servers, and both switched them off around the same time because Outlook didn’t support them (Outlook Express did, but that’s not helpful) One just went the “reply all” route. One used a mailing list (majordomo, iirc). Neither worked remotely as well as NNTP did.
  - zzo38computer 5y ago
    NNTP does support authentication (with username/password or with SASL), although I don't know which client programs implement it (my own currently doesn't, although this could be fixed in future). You could use a mailing list and/or web forum with the same messages as the NNTP. I have my own NNTP server software with partial implementation of a web forum but none of a mailing list yet; I would hope to fix this. Other software might already do this, I don't know. (I know there are programs that can duplicate the messages and make them available, but I don't know if there are those that will use the same message database for all three and/or that will use NNTP as the "main format".) Synchronet might be able to do it; I know it has many functions, including Telnet, NNTP, email, IRC, FidoNet, HTTP(S), SSH, Gopher, PETSCII, etc. There is a web forum too. (As far as I know, it doesn't have Gemini yet.) However, Synchronet is a complicated software, and is designed for a BBS and might not be what you wanted, so having other software can be good if a BBS is not the kind of service you intended to run, I think.
chinathrow 5y ago
Can you elaborate a bit how your mailbox provider knows about click/engangement rate? E.g. why would Fastmail have any metrics on how their users interact with the mail they receive? I see everybody calling out that one should keep a clean subscriber list (e.g. only keep engaged users) but I fail to see this is relevant to the actual mail acceptance/inbox delivery.
kevincox 5y ago
Yeah, this is really annoying because I keep getting silently dropped off of mailing lists because "I don't engage".
- croon 5y ago
  Is this annoying? Do you still want it if there's nothing in it you want to engage with? Or are you saying you want to read it, but take no related actions on it? I would absolutely love to be automatically unsubscribed from everything I don't engage with. I get tons of kinda-sorta-legit marketing emails due to a very old generic gmail address, and people being bad (or lazy) at entering addresses everywhere. (Also tons of actual email meant for other people, but that's another story)
  - kevincox 5y ago
    Often I read it but take not actions. Or just look up related things without following links. Good newsletters often have lots of valuable content in the email. Sometimes there are interesting links, sometimes there aren't. If I don't want it anymore I'll unsubscribe. It feels a lot like why we can't have nice things. If people just hit "Spam" instead of unsubscribing than this overly-cautious defense of senders becomes necessary. Luckily GMail at least has started pushing the unsubscribe feature somewhat, so maybe that will help out. But for now I am being punished because a lot of people mark things that they asked for as spam.

bjustin 5y ago

Clicking links doesn't sound like the sort of thing that email servers would know about one way or the other. Likewise for engaging (or not) with emails at all. What setup do you have in mind where this is the case? Given that AFAIK Apple Mail downloads entire messages regardless of whether they're opened, Apple's change here doesn't seem likely to affect delivery rates in this way anyway.

Nullabillity 5y ago
> Likewise for engaging (or not) with emails at all. What setup do you have in mind where this is the case? If you use IMAP (or basically anything else than POP) then your email client reports the read status back to the server.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  Your IMAP server doesn't report read status back to the sender. Unless your e-mail provider is an advertiser *cough* Google *cough* the advertiser doesn't know if you read a message just because the IMAP server marked it as read. Also an IMAP server's read status doesn't mean someone manually interacted with an e-mail. If you mark messages as read in bulk, even if the provider reported that status to an advertiser, says nothing about engagement.
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    You can request a read receipt with emails, which will cause the MUA to send an email saying you've read the message (although I suspect most clients default to asking you if you want to send it before doing so).
    - dsr_ 5y ago
      In the MUAs which have read receipt functionality, all of them let the end user turn it off. Even MS Outlook.
      - Nextgrid 5y ago
        Which is how it should be - the fact the user can choose to decline is a feature.
- bjustin 5y ago
  Not sure how I forgot un/read status syncs via IMAP. Thanks.

toxik 5y ago

This could be done without duping the receiver’s email client into revealing that the email has been viewed.

hermanradtke 5y ago

> One of the methods email marketers use to keep their email delivery rates high is by removing subscribers that don't engage with their email. Email marketers can still track when a user clicks a link, which is the proper signal for them to be using anyways.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
snowwrestler 5y ago
You get what you measure, so relying solely on clicks to measure interest is going to drive email products toward more clickbait designs and content—reversing a nice trend over the last few years to put most/all of the content into the email itself.

zzo38computer 5y ago

I think that it would be better using NNTP and plain text, and then these problems are avoided anyways. Then the sender need not keep track of these things or to worry about the things that you mentioned, I think. Also can be good to include the text in the message if you can do and not usually needing a link, you can then access it even if you are not connected to the internet, too. (I use email software that is not even capable of HTML email, and I don't want HTML email.)

beagle3 5y ago
Outlook killed NNTP 20 years ago by virtue of not supporting it (every other mail client at the time did). it also suffered as a discussion medium because of the decentralized unauthenticated measure, for sure - I don’t think the global hierarchy would have done much better than it did. But two companies I was consulting for around 2000 had very effective NNTP internal servers, and both switched them off around the same time because Outlook didn’t support them (Outlook Express did, but that’s not helpful) One just went the “reply all” route. One used a mailing list (majordomo, iirc). Neither worked remotely as well as NNTP did.
- zzo38computer 5y ago
  NNTP does support authentication (with username/password or with SASL), although I don't know which client programs implement it (my own currently doesn't, although this could be fixed in future). You could use a mailing list and/or web forum with the same messages as the NNTP. I have my own NNTP server software with partial implementation of a web forum but none of a mailing list yet; I would hope to fix this. Other software might already do this, I don't know. (I know there are programs that can duplicate the messages and make them available, but I don't know if there are those that will use the same message database for all three and/or that will use NNTP as the "main format".) Synchronet might be able to do it; I know it has many functions, including Telnet, NNTP, email, IRC, FidoNet, HTTP(S), SSH, Gopher, PETSCII, etc. There is a web forum too. (As far as I know, it doesn't have Gemini yet.) However, Synchronet is a complicated software, and is designed for a BBS and might not be what you wanted, so having other software can be good if a BBS is not the kind of service you intended to run, I think.

chinathrow 5y ago

Can you elaborate a bit how your mailbox provider knows about click/engangement rate? E.g. why would Fastmail have any metrics on how their users interact with the mail they receive? I see everybody calling out that one should keep a clean subscriber list (e.g. only keep engaged users) but I fail to see this is relevant to the actual mail acceptance/inbox delivery.

kevincox 5y ago

Yeah, this is really annoying because I keep getting silently dropped off of mailing lists because "I don't engage".

croon 5y ago
Is this annoying? Do you still want it if there's nothing in it you want to engage with? Or are you saying you want to read it, but take no related actions on it? I would absolutely love to be automatically unsubscribed from everything I don't engage with. I get tons of kinda-sorta-legit marketing emails due to a very old generic gmail address, and people being bad (or lazy) at entering addresses everywhere. (Also tons of actual email meant for other people, but that's another story)
- kevincox 5y ago
  Often I read it but take not actions. Or just look up related things without following links. Good newsletters often have lots of valuable content in the email. Sometimes there are interesting links, sometimes there aren't. If I don't want it anymore I'll unsubscribe. It feels a lot like why we can't have nice things. If people just hit "Spam" instead of unsubscribing than this overly-cautious defense of senders becomes necessary. Luckily GMail at least has started pushing the unsubscribe feature somewhat, so maybe that will help out. But for now I am being punished because a lot of people mark things that they asked for as spam.