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"Email open" tracking just got a lot more reliable for all mass email & marketing automation vendors. On the flip side, those same solutions can no longer set

• nkoren 13y ago
  > "Email open" tracking just got a lot more reliable for all mass email & marketing automation vendors. Has it? If Google's proxy is caching images, then "email open" tracking might have broken entirely. All the sender would see is that their email has been opened once by the proxy -- for all gmail addresses put together.
  • danielnr 13y ago
    http://example.com/trackingimage.php?email={yourusername}@gmail.com http://example.com/trackingimage.php?email={yourusername}@gm... Or, if they snip the GET variable for whatever reason (I don't see them doing this): http://example.com/gmail/{yourusername}/trackingimage.php http://example.com/gmail/{yourusername}/trackingimage.php Or even: http://example.com/{emailidfromadatabase}/trackingimage.php http://example.com/{emailidfromadatabase}/trackingimage.php This tactic is already in use by most mass email companies.
    • dugmartin 13y ago
      I'd imagine that they are going to de-dup the images they proxy which means email marketers need to generate unique images per mail and that means no more 1-pixel tracking images. A solution would be 1-pixel high tracking lines - a 1 x 128 pixel wide image that encoded 0 and 1 as two RGB colors adjacent to the mail's background color in the visual spectrum so the difference isn't noticeable would encode a sha-1 hash placed in the url. http://example.com/tracking-line/{hash}.png
  • Wilya 13y ago
    Mass-email senders probably would put a unique identifier in the image url (different for all users), so Google will open each image, because it can't know before loading them that it's the same image.
    • mtrimpe 13y ago
      Or they could retrieve every image sent to a gmail address immediately, regardless of whether you viewed it or not. That would essentially render open statistics meaningless and would let Google cripple another industry after the promotions tab and 'not provided.' I really hope they don't because it's such valuable information when creating email copy...
      • Wilya 13y ago
        I agree they could do it, but people upthread are suggesting that Google doesn't do that, and only loads the image when you open the message.
        • Gepser 13y ago
          they could track if an email was opened twice first one = Google second one = user
          • ktsmith 13y ago
            I would imagine that google caches the images so there would be one request instead of two.
            • Gepser 13y ago
              you are right, I didn't think on that
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
• dragonwriter 13y ago
  > "Email open" tracking just got a lot more reliable for all mass email & marketing automation vendors. No, it didn't. If you had chosen the option to ask before displaying external content -- which existed and applied to non-image content and, without which selection, email-open tracking by external non-image content was already reliable -- then the new setting to ask before displaying external images is selected for you by default. If you hadn't selected that option before, you weren't protected from "email open" tracking.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]