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..
Related
One of my customers mentioned to me that the way they have out look set up, allows them to see a short email preview in the form
hello#email.com
Hi, this is a message preview
However when I email, the get a big long https string and at first they thought that the email might include a virus so were dubious about opening it.
I am keen to find a way to stop this happening.
My email displays as
me#email.com
<https://z86orge6w04.....>
I use Thunderbird to send my emails, I shouldnt think that my email client would cause this though.
Also I use an smtp relay mailersend and their details are included in the https link as you will see from the pic.
I have also used socket labs and when I send using their relay, the link is still there but changes slightly
So I think that it may be something to do with the fact I use an SMTP relay
I have noticed though that it only seems to be outlook that shows this, Gmail, thunderbird and others that I have sent testemails to do not display in this manner.
At first I thought that it was because my logo in the header contained a link to the website but I have removed the link and there is no change
The part at the top circled in yellow is what they see when I email, the bit below circled in red is what they see from everyone else
The problem is not related with Thunderbird but with MailerSend which is a transactional email service.
According to mailchimp:
Transactional emails are automated emails sent from one sender to one recipient, usually related to account activity or a commercial transaction.
The URL shown in the Outlook preview is a tracking URL. You can solve this problem by removing tracking or by asking support to MailerSend.
I have a question about tracking email. I've made a server that tracks an email by the inserting the target URL into <img>.
Until now all is good, but if the user (the sender) opens the email, the server gets a GET Request from the Google image proxy. Now this is bad, because this tracking URL was targeting the recipients and not the sender.
I've thought of changing the URL in the sender's side like MailTrack.io does, but don't know how.
Use a mail client that doesn't preview the image. I believe what is happening is that your current mail client is previewing the email for you and tripping your tracking link. Another option would be to use a service like Mailchimp, which will add the tracking code for you. I also believe certain versions of outlook have this feature but I'm not sure how much mileage that will get you.
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.
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 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.