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How do they determine engagement time or whether the email was deleted?
by barumrho 15y ago
How do they determine engagement time or whether the email was deleted?
- aarlo 15y agoWe have a special tracking code that figures it out over the email clients' use of HTTP and with some fancy server-side node/mongodb stuff.
- rorrr 15y agoBullshit. There's not a single major client that executes code from emails. You might be able to have some <img> link back to your server, but even those are blocked by default.
- FaceKicker 15y agoAre images blocked on hotmail, yahoo, etc. too now? I've only used gmail for the past 5+ years. Either way though, it wouldn't really produce a random sample, though maybe it would allow somewhat meaningful comparisons between separate email campaigns even if the absolute numbers aren't too meaningful.
- rorrr 15y agoYeah, all of them block images for emails that come from new contacts.
- OJKoukaz 15y agoThey aren't blocked by default in all clients. Check your mom's iPhone, it loads images by default.
- rorrr 15y agoIf that's true, it's very dangerous. Imagine somebody finds an iphone image vulnerability, a virus based on it will spread across the whole world in a couple of hours.
- 2mur 15y agoMaybe a throttled node.js response on an img on a large image file? edit: Oops I see that staunch beat me to it.
- Udo 15y agoIt's still bullshit. Most email clients don't display images by default. The notion that email reading behavior can be tracked with anything resembling reliability is a blatant lie.
- dangrossman 15y agoI have no idea (didn't find out from a quick browse through the site), but the first thing that came to mind was an image in the mail, pointing to a server that slowly trickles a response without ever finishing so it can measure how long the other end is listening.
- tlack 15y agoPretty genius idea but easy to replicate by the big boys..
- OJKoukaz 15y agoBig boys move slowly. Plus, what isn't "easy to replicate?" aside from network effects.
- MrEnigma 15y agoI worked at an ESP (Email Service Provider) a few years back. It may not be anymore, but it was a crazy environment back then of everyone trying to compete. The major issue with this is going to be scaling it, with large ESP's doing 50-100 million messages a day, and 20-30% of those being opened, that's a lot of processes. This solution will probably be effective, mostly because it's going to a much smaller segment.
- barumrho 15y agoI guess that could work if mail clients don't have timeouts for images. I still can't imagine how they would detect deletion though.
- dangrossman 15y agoThey're just calling "viewed for <x seconds" a deletion, it seems...
- wlievens 15y agoA timeout would possibly be after an engagement time that means "probably read the whole thing", e.g. 60 seconds.
- staunch 15y ago1. In the HTML email put <img src="http://myserver/invisible.gif"> 2. Serve up http://myserver/invisible.gif http://myserver/invisible.gif with a process that trickles down an endless GIF image a few bytes at a time. 3. When the connection to the endless GIF dies, call that the "reading" time. 4. If a "reading" time is under some threshold call it "deleted". That's how I did it a few years ago anyway.
- zrgiu_ 15y agoi never load images automatically in my emails, and I bet a lot of other people do that too
- derwiki 15y agoIf the sender is ReturnPath certified, Hotmail and Yahoo! automatically load images. Those two providers account for a large portion of email on the internet, so there's definitely value in this product.
- derwiki 15y agoThat's a neat trick. After hearing about Mirapoint, I built a simple proof of concept that uses time-delayed redirects to gauge how long a user has attempted to load an image: https://github.com/derwiki/redirect_tracker https://github.com/derwiki/redirect_tracker Like most email metrics, it's lacking -- but this is still -a little- more information, and that goes a long way in email marketing.