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This is more generic: if you do link tracking in your email, do it through your own domain, it's really not that hard, and urls that go through some other busin
by LaGrange 14y ago
This is more generic: if you do link tracking in your email, do it through your own domain, it's really not that hard, and urls that go through some other business are a huge red flag.
Personally, I probably cut people a bit of slack by going through whois to check if the domain belongs to some well-recognized mass mailer, but I wouldn't blame the MUA for just spamming anything that mentions a "login" along with a domain that isn't a descendant of the sender's domain.
- gst 14y agoTrusting whois data isn't a good idea. With most registrars you can write into those fields whatever you want. Just because a domain tells you it belongs to someone, doesn't actually mean that it belongs to this person.
- LaGrange 14y agoWell, yeah, it's generally a first step — last few cases were Kickstarter-related campaign stuff, so I could look for evidence that they actually sent it, and then hope it's actually that thing. But this just goes further to illustrate that this is a really bad idea — there is good way to validate such an email.
- rorrr 14y agoIt's rarely up to a developer. For websites with large email campaigns there's usually a third party system, which has some link tracking feature. And guess what, your marketing department is using it, and they don't want to switch to your custom one (which will take a few months to code, debug, implement all kinds of reporting compatible with what they do now).
- LaGrange 14y agoI would have believed you if I weren't working for a website with large emails campaigns. And this comment wasn't even aimed at "the developer", not really — but at anyone involved in decisions like this.
- signed0 14y agoIn this case one could simply write a script that forwards the request from your own domain to the third party system. It could be done on the server in such a way that the user would never leave your own domain: 1. User clicks http://links.example.com/?redirect=example.com/reset_password http://links.example.com/?redirect=example.com/reset_passwor... 2. The server running on links.example.com makes a request to the third party web server 3. The server redirects the user to http://example.com/reset_password http://example.com/reset_password
- akaBruce 14y agoIf the server running on links.example.com, wouldn't the 3rd party web server lose out on doing things like setting cookies in the client's browser or determining their rough location via IP address? Not that I'm particularly a fan of either practice, but there's probably some use cases there that would have to be accounted for in some way that the 3rd party service could accommodate.
- signed0 14y agoIf that were needed perhaps links.example.com could display an iframe containing the third party site. I agree that neither approach is ideal, but it would prevent users from receiving third party links in their emails.
- jlogsdon 14y agoThose cookies would be blocked for browsers with 3rd-party cookies disabled, and Firefox is making that option the default at some point in the near future.
- rorrr 14y agoYou would have to know the URL on the third party server to redirect to. And usually, you don't, because they are generated internally by some pre-processor.
- 14y ago