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.
Related
I have a software that sends notifications, quotes and invoices to "clients of my clients" by email. Sometimes people don't answer it very fast, so someone needs to call by phone to confirm if they received and get the feedback. I would like to automate this, to know if them, at least, read the email. I know this is very difficult due to how email works, but some companies already try to do this in a satisfactory way, like:
mailgun.com
mailchimp.com
sendwithus.com (YCombinator funded).
In HTML mail messages we can create a resource that points to the server, like a image. But mail clients usually ask permission to the user to load the images. So, problem
here.
But for text mail messages? Is there any way to know the email was read? How companies these companies do?
PS: I don't know what tags is the best to classify my answer, I shall appreciate any edit.
There is no way to be 100% sure if a email was opened, because of its architecture. There are some techniques to do this, but it always depends of user actions and mail client configurations. But:
For HTML messages you can use images and/or the return receipts (RFC 3798).
For text based messages you can use only the return receipts (RFC 3798).
About opening tracking:
Opens are tracked by including a transparent .png file, which will
only work if there is an HTML component to the email (i.e., text only
emails will not track opens). You should note that many email service
providers disable images by default, so this data will only show up if
the recipient clicks on display images button in his/her email.
(Text extracted from mailgun.com user docs)
References:
MailGun.com documentation.
Previous discutions on this thread.
As arnt says, you're fighting the design and basic operation of e-mail. Whenever you send a mail, there is a boundary between a MTA you control (or at least have an account on) and a MTA that is responsible for your target user's mail. What you can know is whether the user's MTA accepted the mail for delivery. Whatever happens afterwards is outside of your control.
Consider an example of a snail mail. When the package enters the recipient's box, you won't know whether they put the whole unopened envelope to a trash bin, or whether they opened is and read the contents very carefully. You can approximate that goal by using crude measures (like embedding a webcam-and-a-computer which will activate upon envelope opening and send you the snapshot of the face of the opener via a cell phone), but doing so is unreliable, unethical, and probably illegal in plenty of countries.
The "return receipts" or embedded image links are similar -- because the whole e-mail is already in the hands of the user's SW, they can do anything with it. A good MUA will probably ask before sending out dumb return receipts, and it also won't load remote images in HTML mail (because it's easy to create an http://trackme.example.org/mail/for/user/12345/message/666/image.png and have a database which says "hey, this URL belongs to Mr. Pichler, and is used in the first message we sent him). The most you can do is to ask nicely, and return receipts (RFC 3798) are a machine-readable way of doing just that.
I yet read some posts on the argument, but I'd like to know if there are some "new" best practice to follow to avoid email clients (thunderbird, Outlook, gmail, ect) block remote images in a html email.
Of corse images in the email have alt description; but there is a way to be considered a secure host to which download images?
Thanks
The biggest thing that affects whether your image will load or not is user interaction. If the user has added you to their address book, responded to your email, sent replies back to you or clicked on links, the email client will add you to the white list and ensure that your emails will be delivered, rendered and isn't spam.
The best thing you can do is send engaging content and give the users a reason to interact with your email.
There are also services out there, like Return Path's Email Certification that will cost you quite a bit of money but ensure much better deliverability to their partner email providers.
Trying to get a list of my email recipients who have seen my email, and then to use a different medium to address who didn't see (via SMS/Call).
I could get the number of people who saw the email by having a hit counter set up in a web server, looking for a method to get this done now. Any help?
Thanks.
It can't be done reliably. Popular email clients will not do anything to alert the sender that an email was received because this allows spammers to detect if the email address is valid. That's why most email clients block remote images until the user clicks "Show Images" because the images could be used for this purpose.
Email system support something called a "read receipt" that is intended for this use but most clients will never send one.
You can detect if an email bounces but receiving an email and viewing an email are two different things.
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.
If I were to build a newsletter emailing system, I will need to be able to generate reports on how many emails bounced, flagged as spam, unsubscribed, read vs. unread, click through rates etc....
So how do you keep track of user activity after the email has been sent? Am I right in assuming that you CAN NOT embed javascript code into emails to monitor user activity? How else do I gather data for my reports?
Once you send the e-mail, it's free like a baby bird kicked out of the nest. The writers of e-mail clients go to great lengths to make sure that they block any feature that will give you that kind of feedback you're asking for. While there are legitimate uses for this sort of information, spammers use such information to verify and clean their e-mail lists.
Many ISPs also block bounces because they give spammers information.
The best you can do is try to give your readers an incentive to click through back to your site. Then, you can gather information not available to a sender of e-mail.
You can easily track click-through rates by including a tracking query string bit in the URLs and route them through your site.
So a link might be: http://mysite.com/?LinkID=foobar
As for read vs. unread you can get an idea for that by including a small transparent image from your site that includes a tracking URL http://mysite.com/track.gif?EmailID=email. However this is not foolproof since emails can be read offline and most modern email clients do not display images without a user action to display images in the email.
For bounced, you'll have to track those by reading from a mailbox for the From email.
Can't think of way to track emails flagged as spam except to send it to several mailboxes that use some of the common spam filtering products and check the results. However, this isn't likely to be accurate because most can and are customized/trained by individual users.
If you want to do click tracking you'll have to replace all links from your message with links
that point back to your tracking script.
To do efficient tracking that you can actually use later for segmenting your list and better targeting you would have to track the subscriber's id and message and/or campaign id.
Some email marketing systems even track the link position in the message so you know exactly if the recipient clicked on the same link that was at the top of the message or in the middle and in the system that I have built I even track if they clicked a link in the html part of the message or the text part.
The tracker script would record all this information then redirect to the actual link.
Bounce tracking is done by processing the bounce messages that your server will receive or generate when a message cannot be delivered. I recommend using VERP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_envelope_return_path
Open tracking is done by including the image with tracking code in the url. This would normally point to a script on your site that would record the subscriber id and message and/or campaign id then output the binary date for a transparent 1x1 px wide gif.
You can also track messages that are flagged as spam by some users of some ISPs like hotmail, yahoo, aol, and a few others. they offer feedback loops so every time someone clicks that "Spam" button in their webmail application they will send you a message that you can parse and determine the subscriber that actually flagged the message as spam. VERP also helps with this because the feedback loop messages don't always include the actual email address of the subscriber so you need another way to identify them. This page on wikipedia has a list of feedback ISPS that offer feedback loops : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_Loop_%28email%29