Tagopens

No, Gmail did not just break all open tracking

I was avoiding commenting on the email open tracking bad take that seems to be going viral round the more gullible corners of LinkedIn.

I avoided it for long enough that other folks wrote articles saying pretty much what I’d say. Yay!

You should read what Al has to say over at SpamResource.

Deliveries and Opens and Clicks

I always want to say “Emails, and Opens, and Clicks… Oh My!” when I’m talking about them. We really want to understand how a mailbox provider perceives the streams of email we send them. Some of the things the provider looks at are technical and objective – is the email coming from who it claims to be coming from? Is there an attachment that contains a virus? We have...

Apple MPP

You’ve probably heard about Apple Mail Privacy Protection. Email marketing chat has been all a-twitter about it since it was announced in June. Skipping over all the “Openpocalypse” panic, what is it and what does it do? Image Loads It’s all about images in email and how they’re loaded (particularly invisible one pixel images that are used solely for tracking). Why...

Stop obsessing about open rates

In 2020: 250OK says open rates were much lower than ESPs report. The Only Influencers list hosts a discussion about the value and use of open rates. A potential client contacts me asking if I can get their open rates to a certain percentage.A client shows me evidence of 100% inboxing but wants to improve their open rate.An industry group runs sessions at multiple meetings discussing how...

Measurements

One of the things I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about lately is how we measure deliverability. Standard deliverability measurements include: opens, bounces, complaints, and clicks. There are also other tools like probe accounts, panel data, and public blocklists. Taken together these measurements and metrics give us an overall view of how our mail is doing. More and more...

A must read on engagement

I really can’t add anything to what Chad wrote in Opens, Clicks, And Blocks In The Third Age Of Email Deliverability

FAQ about opens and Gmail caching

I had hoped to blog about something else today, but this still seems to be a big concern for a number of people. There are a lot of questions running around, some of which we don’t have answers to, others of which we have answers based on some evidence. It’s important to remember that we’ve seen Gmail roll things out and then roll things back and do phased transitions during...

Gmail deploys image proxy servers

This afternoon Justin Foster of LiveClicker posted to the OnlyInfluencers list asking about Gmail rewriting links. Sometime very recently (last 24-48 hours), we are seeing that Google made a change to Gmail such that all image URLs in the email content are replaced by a call to Google’s content caching service googleusercontent.com. For example, an image with the src: “; will be...

Tor cleans up their lists

Recently I got an email from Tor. Apparently they’re watching their opens and clicks and they noticed I hadn’t loaded any images recently. We notice you haven’t opened the Tor.com newsletter in a while, and that’s okay: we know you’re busy. That’s why we create our newsletter from scratch each week, to highlight the articles we think you’ll love and round...

Meaningless metrics

I’ve been having some conversations with fellow delivery folks about metrics and delivery and bad practices. Sometimes, a sender will have what appear to be good metrics, but really aren’t getting them through any good practices. They’re managing to avoid the clear indicators of bad practices (complaints, SBL listings, blocks, etc), but only because the metrics aren’t good...

Recent Posts

Archives

Follow Us