MJML-based emails getting aggressively clipped by Gmail - email

For the news outlet I work for, we use MJML-created templates to send out our newsletters, some of which can get pretty long. We had never run into the message clipped problem in Gmail through the several months we've been using MJML, but last week, all of our emails, even the shorter ones, are being clipped in Gmail. I've read that emails larger than 102kb are clipped, but my longest email clocks in at 60kb.
Does anyone know if something changed in the way Gmail determines what gets clipped?
I can share the code for my most recent clipped email if it helps.

Related

Email Tracking issue incase of multiple receipents

I had recently made an email tracking system for a friend of mine (we track emails by using image tracking pixels). It is working perfectly fine, except for two cases..(we track emails by using image tracking pixel)
1. If I send a mail with tracking on, and then I open the same mail from “sent item”, it will read the image and will appear as mail has been read since the image was loaded again. And as such even though the receipent hasn’t opened the mail, system will still show it as a read mail
2. How do I track my email incase of multiple recipients? I mean how will i be able to check who has opened and who hasn’t out of the lot. I tried researching over the net, but found only few companies are doing that. Form what I could gather, they were somehow sending unique tracking out to all the recipents. Somehow they are splitting the mails when sent form gmail.

Sudden high email bounce rates when using new email template

We have been using iContact for Salesforce to send our company's mass emails for a couple years. We typically have low bounce rates (1-2%) and are consistently sending large numbers of emails (30,000 - 40,000 total sends per month, spread across 10-20 different emails).
Earlier this year, we launched a new product (The Outcomes Survey), and I created a new HTML email template for it with unique branding for the new product. Every time we send an email with this new template, the bounce rates are in excess of 15% (even though it's sent to the same group of contacts we send our typical emails to, and comes from the same email address).
When I pull a bounce report, most of the diagnostic codes are: "spam-related (554 rejected due to spam content)"
I have run the email template itself through several online spam tests, and it comes out clean. As far as I am able to tell, there's nothing in inherently wrong with the email. You can see a sample email here.
When we send emails using our original company branding and template, our bounce rates are low. Any email sent with The Outcomes Survey branding, bounce rates jump up again.
I'm stumped!
I was able to solve the problem by recreating the email from another template that has worked in the past. So, I guess there was some code in the original HTML email template that was causing problems, although I wish I knew what it was!

Force to render images in mails

I created a newsletter with simplenews module and mime mail module in D7 and all the things like sending email and subscribing work correctly , but there is something i'd like to ask :
How can i render images in email ????
Now images are hidden in email and you have to click on "This message contains blocked image. Show images . "
Is there any trick that show images in email without any clicks ?
And
Why Yahoo-mail show mails in inbox and gmail show them in spam ?
What you asking for cannot be done by the sender. This is an anti-spam feature of the email client and by default, it will block images from unknown senders. Your message is appearing in the spam folder may be due to these and other reasons:
"Spammy" content
High image to text ratio
You've been flagged as spam before
There are many other factors that goes into deliverability, such as server reputation, user preference, user interaction and so on. Spam filters exist to keep unwanted emails away from users.
The only sure way to make sure you land in the inbox and have your images shown by default, is to get added to the recipient's address book (getting whitelisted) and have them turn their images on by default.
If you would like further reading or to perform spam testing before you send emails, check out Litmus. They're great.

Gmail blocking pixel tracking / 1x1 pixel since today morning

I was implementing pixel tracking for a gmail web service, but since today google has changed the gmail client to proxy linked images !
Is there any work around, as the proxy is giving my server a fake/masked ip and location?
This is true. gmail has been proxying all user content via it thus showing Mountain View,CA as its REMOTE_ADDR. This is true only for gmail clients. The same logic has not been working on Gmail via outlook or any other mail client.
Most email tracking companies rely on these details to differentiate the recepients of the mail.
I dont think there is a work around. But if there is one we would find out soon given that these companies have a lot to lose.
Meanwhile, you could try using HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR or disposition notification headers. But given that this can be messed with, there isnt much option left but just go back to making people click on links!!!
In my experience as of Aug 5 2018 my emails sent with a tracking pixel are blocked by google. I uncheck the send tracking pixel box in my crm and the message arrives instantly. The tracked email never arrives.
I made a video to show but its exactly as I just described and quite boring to watch lol. BUt you get the point. Obviously this is just in my experience but it's too bad because knowing if my clients read it is only way know not to keep sending the same message in a different way assuming it went to spam.
Looks to me like they're caching, not just proxying.. I whipped up a PHP file to output a random image selected out of a collection of 5 images... It's the same image each time.. Testing against Yahoo! mail and outlook, both of which change each time the email is opened..

Tracking email bounces, opens, clicks

I found How do you make sure email you send programmatically is not automatically marked as spam? to (hopefully) be a solid guide to avoiding being marked as spam. Are there any other important tips/suggestions?
How do I track bounces,opens,clicks?
These are features found in paid services like Mail Chimp and Campaign Monitor.
Do the same as Mail Chimp and Campaign Monitor then. LIE about your stats.
There is no accurate way to track emails. If there was it'd just get blocked again. Most people don't want you to know these things and most email software ensures you don't. The stats provided by email tracking services are bogus.
Consider:
Most spam services will detect image
'bugs' and flag you as spam.
Image bugs don't do anything until
the user clicks 'show images'. This
does not mean they didn't open or
read it without images. How can you tell if a mail service downloaded the image preemptively to cache it or check it for image spam?
It can be difficult to determine the difference between a bounce and a reply due to differences in mail servers.
Only clicks can be tracked by redirecting through your server. Even then who can say that mail services won't start processing links in emails to determine whether the email is spam?
Opens can be tracked using a 1x1 picture file in an email. However, this is the same tactic that spammers use to validate email address existence, so you'll be fighting on the same side in that regard, unfortunately.
Clicks can be tracked by assigning a unique identifier to each link, determined by two variables: the URL that was clicked and the email address that clicked it. You can, for example, determine these on-send and store them in a database with the same unique identifier.
Bounces should bounce back to you with the email address intact.
I was looking at the email facebook sends out. In addition to an image, they use a bgsound element as a tracking bug like this:
<bgsound src="http://www.facebook.com/email_open_log_pic.php?mid=99999999&s=a"
volume="-10000" />
I'm guessing the bgsound src is fetched by some readers when the images are off.
Check out Ask MailChimp: How do you track email opens?
if you really want to track bounces, use a service like Email Delivered (www.emaildelivered.com)
i also use Return Path (www.returnpath.com) for a really good reading on whats being delivered to the inbox vs spam box and what esp's are totally rejecting my mail.
Two ideas, clicking links, and statistical fudgery.
Clickthroughs
I would like to add that you can mark emails as read by a user clicking a "view this email online" or by tracking click-throughs. If a user clicks on any <a> tag in your email, send it to a script first that logs the email as read and marks which link they clicked on. This will give you can get a more accurate number.
Stats
I wonder if there is any research into how many users don't show images. That way you could 'statistically' correct for the lower open counts. Just did a bit of reading and found:
A 2009 report from Merkle states that only 48% of email recipients see
images automatically. This means that if an email campaign relies
heavily on images, it’s probably not being read by over half of its
intended recipients. Source
The same site says:
In the latest MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Benchmark Report (2010), a survey of email recipients found that only 33% have images turned on by default.
Somewhere in between there could be a useful figure (35-40%) of users not displaying images in emails. That doesn't necessarily say that those users are opening the emails. Just that auto-displaying images isn't enabled.
If anyone can come up with some more facts/stats, we could potentially get a correction factor. Just with this information I don't think you can do much other than marketing smoke-and-mirrors. For example, 30% opened the emails. Based on 35% of users not displaying images, that means ~9% of users didn't display images, but explicitly chose to turn them on for this email (not really, but just go with it). Let's say that leaves 26% to unaccounted for. You could "correct" your 30% to 56%! All with the magic of bogus stats and a touch of marketing.