I received a similar email a few months ago. I was rather annoyed to receive it, to be honest, because I had been reading the emails. Just with images disabled.
You're being almost too polite. Fab's mails utterly pointless without the images.
I normally hate email with lots of images and prefer plain text over HTML, but in this particular case anyone claiming to read your emails with the images off is just trolling.
Here is an example of our emails, http://cdn.splatf.com/w/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/fab-email..., it is from a while ago but the layout is the same. As you can see we are a very visual company. The emails mirror the site so you can use that as a reference too. Again very visual and "not easily replaced".
No. He's annoyed that a company tried to automatically detect whether or not he was reading the e-mail and got it wrong. The only thing worse than having to manually do something is to have it automatically done wrong for you.
Perhaps the solution here is to include an "opt back in" link to that email.
Actually, it would be better to change the frequency (slow them down) of your mailouts to that person with the option to request a return to the old frequency.
Where I work we run a batch job that looks for inbound clicks from an email without a corresponding "email opened" tracking pixel being fired. Gives us an idea of how many people are engaging with images turned off or some other form of tracking pixel blocking.
Our analytics wizards then use that and other data to come up with some estimates on how many users are opening our emails with images disabled.
On my list of about 11,500, just under 400 people have "opened never" but have clicked at least one link. So it's a pretty small number. I'd be you can just about double it to get the total number of opens that haven't been tracked.
It seems likely that clicks would be factored into the logic as well, I wonder if they ever stop emailing people that never click / buy / other action.
It sounds like the emails were mostly HTML mail that fetched external images. HTML mail is a terrible thing that should be stopped, and HTML mail that fetches anything external is a security problem. It's nice to know that these Fab people were thinking about their customers, but the bigger picture here is that HTML mail was being abused to violate those same customers' privacy. It may have been for a good reason, but it was still a bad thing to do and legitimizing the practice will make it easier to carry out attacks via email.
The solution to inbox clutter is filtering. If users are too lazy to make filters, then the problem is with the effort required to make filters.
But I think the fact that users opt-in to HTML emails and engage with them far more frequently than text opt-in and engagement indicates that your opinion is an outlier.
I like HTML email. I opt-in only to companies that interest me enough to do so. Those times when I'm opted-in accidentally by not unchecking a box or whatever during checkout I just unsubscribe from and move on. What I have left is useful content in my inbox, some of it more directly sales oriented, the rest more generally informational.
Similarly, for certain senders, I chose to tell Gmail to always load their images — including tracking pixels. It's not a violation of my privacy any more than the numerous pixels on any other website I read.
I have little doubt that I am an outlier, since most users have no idea what HTML even is. I am doubtful that people are truly "opting in" to receive email; it seems more likely that they were not paying attention to the "yes by default" checkbox.
HTML mail itself is a security problem. It has been used for fairly sophisticated phishing attacks in the past:
It is almost certainly being used for phishing attacks now. It makes it difficult to give users visual cues about which emails can be trusted, since the sender could have embedded HTML in the message to present that same queue. An attacker might give the user the idea that a message was digitally signed by using HTML mail.
Security with HTML mail is a serious enough concern that the DoD will sometimes convert all incoming HTML mail to plaintext as a precaution:
> In other words, it is a violation of your privacy. The fact that it is a common practice on the web does not somehow make it less of a violation.
So...the web at large violates people's privacy. I can agree to that, but I prefer a world where everyone has easy access to large amounts of information.
If the available communication mediums are only those that are secure but difficult to use, then the ecosystems of many sites would be much smaller. I can't imagine trying to browse Facebook or Yelp over a TOR connection. It's feasible but annoying to me. That tells me most of my friends and family would simply consider this process unfeasible and not use it.
You know, there was a time when browsing the web did not entail constant violations of your privacy. The web has always been open and has always been giving people easy access to information, since its very inception; the assault on privacy came later, when greedy advertisers showed up and took advantage of security problems and user ignorance.
While Tor is fairly annoying for most people (even myself), other privacy-protecting systems are less annoying. I have yet to hear someone complain about using ABP, which I would classify as privacy protecting (it blocks a large number of common tracking systems). I suspect nobody would complain about Firefox blocking tracking cookies by default either.
Really, we can live in a world where privacy is respected if we are willing to do so and willing to deploy the necessary technologies. One of my side projects is to develop a system that allows targeted ads to be delivered in a privacy-preserving fashion, so that advertisers can know which ads are successful without knowing whether any individual person actually viewed or clicked on their ads (using cryptographic techniques). My point is that there is no need to violate privacy and that better technologies can be developed and deployed.
You know, the "Greedy Advertisers" showed up when "Greedy Website Operators" decided that they didn't want to pay out of pocket to provide people with information. And that, actually, they'd like to make a buck or two doing it.
The web today has far more information and functionality than ever before. Much of this free to me because of advertising.
You act like the advertisers some how force things down your throat. If you don't want to deal with advertising, the answer is simple: Avoid websites that rely on advertising dollars.
ABP is one of the first things I install on friends' computers which I have had to remove malware from. I genuinely think, for normal non-techy users, it is probably one of the most effective and simple methods of stopping people accidentally giving themselves problems.
Obviously this isn't because of the nice sites with good content which just want to make some money from their effort, it's generally because of less legitimate sites. But I think the idealogical argument of "these content providers deserve to get paid" just falls into irrelevance for these people when the alternative is protecting their computers, privacy, safety online, and of course their time.
As an ABP user who uses it mainly to make my internet experience nicer, I can take the time to unblock websites which I agree I should be supporting or reimbursing somehow for the content they have provided me, but most people would never take the time to do this, and for them the best solution seems to me to be blocking all ads where possible.
> I am doubtful that people are truly "opting in" to receive email; it seems more likely that they were not paying attention to the "yes by default" checkbox.
Are you serious? I can assure you that I have opted in to receive email, even HTML email, and so have nearly all my friends.
> I am doubtful that people are truly "opting in" to receive email; it seems more likely that they were not paying attention to the "yes by default" checkbox.
We manage lists with an aggregate about 1 million people who have all explicitly ticket checkboxes that were not checked by default and/or explicitly gone into their user account and added mailing lists on various sites we operate for clients.
That you even doubt that people are truly opting in just reinforce how much of an outlier you are.
> It is almost certainly being used for phishing attacks now.
And the solution is to teach users about phishing. That's the only sane route, it's what everybody is doing and, by the way, and it mostly works (despite some ISPs, governments and banks trying hard to teach people that they must click on every unreliable warning).
> An attacker might give the user the idea that a message was digitally signed by using HTML mail.
I understand where you're coming from, but you're swimming upstream in a raging torrent and being carried away at 100x the speed of your progress.
The filter side can always be better, sure, but HTML is tremendously successful and it only annoys a tiny minority. It's not going anywhere, accepting this will create less cognitive dissonance for yourself.
I am fine swimming upstream. I browse with Javascript disabled, I am not on any social networking sites, I do not have a smartphone, etc. I do not get too stressed about these things as long as I can keep doing things my way.
Ultimately, I think filtering is going to win. The problems with HTML mail are going to become more severe, not less. Phishing attacks are becoming more and more of a problem, and HTML mail makes phishing attacks much easier to carry out. The sort of tracking that Fab used to detect who was actually reading their mail could just as easily be used to identify potential targets for scams, or in a coordinated attack of some kind. We cannot continue to leave ourselves open to such attacks -- eventually we are going to have to start blocking HTML mail or at least blocking external images/etc. Filters that are good enough to reduce clutter are already starting to be deployed e.g. GMail's Priority Inbox, and GMail already blocks external images by default.
Anything other than basic text formatting is at least a major security problem. The simplest scenario is a phishing attack that disguises itself as a plaintext message, with blue underlined URLs that are actually links to the attacker's site. There have also be CSRF attacks carried out by HTML mail. More sophisticated attacks are also possible:
Even more sophisticated attacks could be imagined. Suppose you train users to look for a digital signature check; an HTML message could be used to create something that looks like such a check, tricking people into believing they received a signed message. The sort of monitoring used to unsubscribe Fab's readers could have been used to determine when people are at their desks in a particular office, or who is more likely to read a scam message.
It is a no-brainer: HTML mail allows the sender of a message to render things of their choosing on your screen, and potentially execute code they have written on your computer (similar things can be said about the web; the difference is that setting up a website is useless if nobody visits it, but with email you get to send someone the message without waiting for them to request it). There are other complaints about HTML mail, but the security angle is biggest in my opinion.
betterunix has spoken folks. If we just do what he thinks is best, the world would be a better place. Your little 'opinions' are cute but they ultimately don't matter, because betterunix has decided what is best, and that is that HTML mail is terrible and should be stopped. TEXT FOR US ALL.
Sometimes I think people use these logical classifications to downplay others too liberally. In this case benihana's sarcasm is effective because it uses ad hominem. It's meant to point out that perhaps his response is too absolutist given it's a not widely held opinion.
I did something similar with my Ruby Weekly list (basically removed 1000 folks from a 18,000 list) and sent a message saying what I'd done and invited them to resubscribe if I'd got it wrong and.. I got quite a few nasty mails. People ranting that they read with images off or saying that I didn't appreciate their subscription if they didn't click on things, etc. Nonetheless, open rates did improve significantly.
Lesson learned.. if I do it again, I won't send the mail telling people I have ;-)
I wonder how they track this? I haven't been able to attend any local Meetups for example (and sometimes just delete the email outright), but this is one of the few I want to keep receiving because, you know, someday I'll have time...
There are a few sneaky ways in addition to the per-user URL tracking image people have mentioned. There was some internet drama about facebook (ab)using bgsound attribute of html mail to detect even when people have disabled image viewing.
ReadNotify (as reviewed by jgrahamc[2]) also seems to use similar tricks, including loading remote resources via css url() and similar.
I don't really understand how the background css url() one is any different than using a tracking pixel, don't all client block background along with normal images?
I guess it might just be a bug in some (web-)mail clients which just stripped <img>, ... tags or something rather than all potentially url-referenced assets. Not certain though.
Hey, I'm on the marketing team at Fab. We send our email through Sailthru. Like most email providers tracking is done through image pixels. So we're able to pull data on which users have not opened certain emails over a given time period.
For what it's worth, you would have gotten no data from me. My email client will not load anything external and will not even attempt to render HTML mail.
Also, I am in a minority with this, but when I receive an HTML message without any plaintext portion I delete it; if it is an unsolicited message I mark it as spam.
Very good point -- I will delete emails from Meetup that I have no interest in, but certain verticals I will open the email to check it out. You can customize these emails in Meetup a bit based on categories you choose, but they'd have to be pretty sophisticated to track unread emails by meetup type.
Most emails these days contain graphics or other 'call home' sorts of bugs that are activated on render. Its another form of analytics. Especially easy to do for 'shopping' sites.
I'm in the process of moving my e-mail to Sailthru. I'm really impressed by their capabilities, though the transition hasn't been quite as smooth as I would have liked. I'm finally starting to dive into doing stuff like this, and I'm really excited about using data to improve the experience from people who get my daily e-mails.
Not only can I stop bothering people who are no longer reading my e-mails, but I can also cut costs by removing users who aren't engaged. It's a win-win.
That's why you send a warning e-mail. You could also opt them down to a weekly digest instead of daily e-mails.
One good thing about Sailthru is that it you can track all clicks on links. So if you have a user with no opens and no clicks over a few months, you have a lot more certainty that they're not reading (especially if your e-mails have a considerable amount of links).
Hey, on the marketing team at Fab. Yes, we use Sailthru and thus can track which emails users open over a given period of time. Sailthru has a decent api however this operation was actually done manually with a bulk pull of data from Sailthru and then a query to the database on our end. In the future we'll probably automate this, though for right now our dev cycles are too precious :)
It isn't universally accepted that regular unread emails provide no value to the company or user.
There is a whole argument about how even if you don't open emails, just seeing the name of the company in your inbox increases recall value so tomorrow when you do have a need for a pair of shoes, you'll more likely check out the company that's been emailing you daily than a company you haven't heard about much.
At least equally likely: your daily emails will generate so much noise that the customer will train themselves to ignore you. (One could argue that that's why they stopped reading your emails to begin with.)
There is some idea that this impacts email inbox rates, at least with certain large ISPs. I do something similar, but its based on if the person has not clicked on anything in the e-mail for a while.
If your not on Amazon SES paying tiny 10 cent CPMs, then there is some financial incentive to throttle your sending back a bit too.
I've seen marketing blog articles that claim unopened emails affect inbox rates but I've never seen any numerical evidence nor heard it from someone who worked at a large ISP. Do you have any of those resources?
But they may provide value to someone in marketing whose targets and/or compensation is naively tied to subscriber count without a measure of engagement.
We've done this too, and the reason is this: dropping people who don't read your newsletter increases your open rate, and decreases your spam reports. This makes it less likely some large mail host will drop your newsletter entirely.
The reason you send an email is for people who don't turn on images or click on links, but still want your newsletter.
I can understand the removing non-readers can decrease your spam reports because I have seen numbers where a significant number of non-openers hit the spam button. However, do you have any evidence that an increased open rate helps your deliverability? There seem to be lots of people claiming unopened emails are bad for you but I have not heard anything like that from someone on the inside like someone at Gmail?
We've read it from various experts, but you have a point - I don't think it's been said directly by any mail hosts. They tend not to say much on the subject though.
Fab is notoriously bad about email delivery. It's become a joke between my girlfriend and I that when one of our phone buzzes it "must be Fab again". I can't recall how I ended up on their lists but I believe it was due to some competition.
This actually seems like a great idea. I remember reading that your spam score is in part based on email open rates, by dumping users who have no chance of opening you decrease your likelihood of getting blocked for a campaign.
It also has the nice benefit of publicity and reduced mailchimp/other provider fees.
On second thought, I'm not sure if any of these would offset the cost per acquisition of even a few users who were accidentally "let go" by this tactic. I hope fab posts some statistics at some point.
The crappy thing is that some clients (Apple Mail) download images even if you haven't opened the email, so Fab would think you're opening all the sends. But if you moved over to a better sign of engagement like clicking on an encoded URL, then you might be throttling sends to some folks who are actually opening.
Hey, on the marketing team at Fab. We know that a lot of people love to purely just open our emails because they are pretty visual and there is a huge part of discovery; they might not always see something they like and thus click. We thought the risk of opting out these people outweighed the risk of accidentally leaving in people with clients like Apple Mail.
At first I thought this was for a startup that offers this service. I don't know if I'd use it, but it seems like a pretty cool offering someone could easily code up - have it detect what types of emails you don't read and then automatically send those emails into another folder.
Hey, on the marketing team at Fab. Honestly for us we never really considered the cost savings or have had to worry about being blacklisted. The decision wasn't almost entirely jump-started by anecdotal evidence from customer service that it would be a good idea. Obviously there are plenty of financial and operational reasons to do this, but ultimately if it's good for the customer then it's good for us and the brand.
Yeah I work for a daily email site and we do this too. We just don't send another email letting them know - that's more spam! I was surprised that this was considered newsworthy... Most people in the industry do this. It's definitely considered best-practice - it reduces costs, improves metrics, and probably doesn't subtract much value compared how much it costs to keep sending them emails.
You'd be surprised at how little most startup focused journalists know about the day to day of the industry. If it hasn't been touted in a press release or mentioned at an investors conference they probably don't know about it.
I think it's often not that cynical. I worked for a fairly large B2B email newsletter company and we would periodically clean the list mainly because we wanted an honest, accurate count of our list size.
I would love it if this option was offered by the providers such as Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor et all. They have the opportunity to improve their industry and in turn improve clients business.
The tracking is already happening. Put it to good use!
Is your email client really set up to phone home to the sender to retrieve additional images when it opens an email? Doesn't that strike you as an information leak/privacy issue?
Mine (Gmail) is not, but many (Outlook, OSX Mail) allow this by default. The URL of the tracking image contains a number or hash that is used to uniquely identify the person opening up the email.
Outlook hasn't done this by default for at least two if not three versions now. However if you read a heavily stylized with images email you'll almost certainly tell it to download images (just as one does in gmail), giving them that feedback that they want.
https://emailprivacytester.com/ seems like a way to check how your usual clients fare with these various tracking methods. Or a cunning way of snarfing emails, I dunno.
This isn't just good will towards the consumer; retailers are paying per e-mail that is sent out, so it is good practice to prune the list of addresses that haven't opened e-mails in a while.
I used to use unread emails as my to-do list. I recently started using Mailbox, and have embraced the Inbox Zero philosophy of every email in my inbox (regardless of read status) as a to-do item.
I've found that nearly everything I do with email works better this way.
This is definitely good email sender behaviour, but I would hesitate to purely put this down to the altruistic notion of 'keeping your inbox tidy' - Inbox Zero is a problem fairly isolated to the Newserati and similar thin slices of population.
Fact is, Email Deliverability is increasingly engagement-driven these days, especially with the major ISPs, and additionally sending email costs money.
--
At its most basic level, a sender's 'spamminess' is determined by percentage of spam reports against overall deliveries from that IP. Levels over 1% put your reputation in the 'severe' category, and risk lack of inbox delivery, blacklists and more. Having more engaged users leads to a better ratio - for this reason alone keeping your recipients 'fresh' is valuable.
Additionally, another common pattern of email (or more correctly a sender:template combination) falling into the 'spam' category for an ISP is to see a few percentage points in drop, followed by a complete /dev/null-ing. When the initial drop happens, whether or not your recipients correct that as a false-positive will determine whether you get the Full Monty. Naturally therefore removing the least engaged users has a significant beneficial effect on overall deliverability.
These days though, it's getting more complex, nuanced and ultimately more individual.
Gmail moved some time back from a centralized concept of 'spam' to a much more personal view by using your positive and negative engagement signals: opens, clicks, replies, 'delete without reading','report spam' etc. They explicitly modify the visibility of email in your personal inbox through the 'important' flag (http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...), but there is good evidence that negative engagement can carry an email all the way to the spam box for a given user and consequently affect the overall deliverability.
This has a strong benefit for Gmail in that they become much harder to 'game' - something Google Search team also has plenty of experience in avoiding. They essentially eschew the classic SMTP 5xx return codes for 'Accept All, Ask Questions Later' in all but the most egregious cases, and provide little to no feedback for senders to troubleshoot delivery problems on the basis that if your users want your mail, it would be getting through.
--
The second primary motivator here (still with me?) is that sending email also has a non-zero cost which is almost entirely driven by sheer subscriber count and delivery attempts.
Consider a typical mass-marketing email with a 10-15% open rate, delivered multiple times a month. Even assuming a varied engagement profile that mailer is engaging with at most 50% of their list over the month. A simple list of 1MM recipients would incur an increased cost of a couple of thousand dollars a month to send into the vacuum of disinterest.
There is, in certain circumstances, a benefit to be gained from 'eyeballs on subjects' for brand awareness, but that metric is near impossible to track, and as mentioned above unopened emails can be deleterious to your overall delivery to the more engaged segments.
For both the reasons highlighted above, mass-market email has been using the 're-engagement' method (breathlessly described in the OP as a customer-driven action), to keep their lists fresh and costs down.
I do applaud the application of metrics to provide intelligent subscription management. At PostageApp we see the best delivery rates come from our clients who take active interest in the concept of humans at the end of the SMTP pipe. The growing provision of engagement data through APIs is helping drive solutions like FAB's, and the end result is a better experience for the user. That said, this particular innovation came not from the consumer-friendly high visibility consumer and SaaS markets, but has been around for many years in the risk-heavy line treading bulk marketing industry.
