Our company delivers leads via email to our customers from our website. So we store those leads in our database. I want to be able to track if the email is received by the destination, opened, or if its bounced back or considered spam. I then want to update the database entry so I can quickly see if the lead made it through. A buddy suggested SendGrid as a SAS or PowerMTA as a exim replacement. I was just curious if anyone else had any good ideas?
Although this won't work for everyone, it's quite a neat little trick that will tell you that some people have definitely opened their emails...
put an img tag in your email as so:
<img src="http://yourserver.com/emailOpened?userID=[[theUsersID]]" />
When the email is opened, a request is made to your server for the image. you can match up the [[theUsersID]] with the user in your database, and you know they have received and opened the email.
As stated - it won't work for everyone - a lot of email clients will not open images by default, but it will tell inform you that some people have definitely opened the email, and you will know who they are.
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'm reading about the new development of Google quick action buttons in the mail inbox.
I'm a little bit lost in this topic and not understand how I can include this function in my emails.
I have read about DKIM/SPF but I don't know if this functionality could need to do an google app.
I have my mail server with marketing segmentation and I want this button is visible when email come to client (destiny) gmail inbox (guess only works in gmail....). If i have included the markup code in html in my emails, why i can't see this button?
would it need create a specific mail application to implement this feature and send emails from this app? Someone tried this?
I know maybe this has been reply before but i think must start more down... so.. sorry.
Thanks and regards!
When you are ready to launch your marked up emails to your users, you will need to register with Google. Please follow this process:
1.Send a real-life email coming from your production servers (or a server with similar DKIM/SPF/From:/Return-Path: headers) including the markup / schema to schema.whitelisting+sample#gmail.com.
2.If you send a test/blank email, an email that does not contain schema or if you don't send an email for review your application will be silently discarded.
3.Make sure that the markup is correct prior to sending the email. For more details see Testing your Schema. Especially make sure the email passes the Email markup Tester and that there are no errors, also make sure to include as much data as possible.
4.Gmail removes all markup when forwarding an email. Do not forward the email but send it directly.
Fill out the registration form available here.
Here is the link for the documentation.
Hope this helps!!
Are you sending a promotional email (offers, etc.)?
If yes, then you are likely to be delivered to the Promotions tab, where quick actions do not work (according to Litmus - https://litmus.com/ebooks/gmail-ebook/gmail-ebook/).
Quick Actions work best in the Inbox for transactional emails.
("Here is your booking confirmation" [Check-in now] quick action)
These typically arrive directly in the Inbox.
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.
I've written a bug reporter for my game, and after it launches, the user can review the data and submit the report to my web server via HTTP. If the submission fails, the user has the option to save the report and try again later, using the bug reporter itself, uploading the file with a web form, or attaching the report to an e-mail. I know that I can prevent spam over HTTP by analyzing the source IP, but I'm not sure how to go about this when receiving reports over e-mail. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Rob
EDIT:
The attachment will always be in JSON format; any other will be rejected. I'm just worried someone will do this:
for i = 1, 10000 do
json = generate_valid_json()
send_email(json)
end
and flood my bug tracker with noise.
Other than regular spam filters, etc I do have a suggestion for this.
If, in your application, or page, you can specify a Subject= with the Mailto: link, put a unique ID in the Subject of your message that you will be expecting to receive.
That way you accomplish 2 goals - recognizing the ID in the subject, you will know it's not spam, and if that ID is associated with your bug report, you'll already know where to put it when it arrives.
EDIT: This doesn't necessarily have to be in the subject, either - could be in the body, or you could simply give them a unique ID e-mail address to send to if you can support a catchall... like bug-394291#bugs.whatever.com.
How about saving the report when the first attempt to upload fails. When the user starts the game, start a background thread which tries to deliver the report again. Eventually, it should work and the user will have to do anything.
Sounds like you're trying to tell the difference between e-mail from random people you've never talked to before, that are sending you attachments, from spam e-mail.
Good luck!
Can you change the e-mail address every so often?
Require a certain subject line?
Require plain-text e-mail?