Show HN: Email open rates are stupid.

by aarlo • 15 years ago

24 31 15 years ago

barumrho2• 15 years ago

How do they determine engagement time or whether the email was deleted?

aarlo4• 15 years ago

We have a special tracking code that figures it out over the email clients' use of HTTP and with some fancy server-side node/mongodb stuff.

rorrr5• 15 years ago

Bullshit. There's not a single major client that executes code from emails.

You might be able to have some <img> link back to your server, but even those are blocked by default.

2mur• 15 years ago

Maybe a throttled node.js response on an img on a large image file? edit: Oops I see that staunch beat me to it.

dangrossman2• 15 years ago

I have no idea (didn't find out from a quick browse through the site), but the first thing that came to mind was an image in the mail, pointing to a server that slowly trickles a response without ever finishing so it can measure how long the other end is listening.

tlack• 15 years ago

Pretty genius idea but easy to replicate by the big boys..

barumrho2• 15 years ago

I guess that could work if mail clients don't have timeouts for images.

I still can't imagine how they would detect deletion though.

staunch• 15 years ago

1. In the HTML email put

    <img src="http://myserver/invisible.gif">

2. Serve up http://myserver/invisible.gif with a process that trickles down an endless GIF image a few bytes at a time.

3. When the connection to the endless GIF dies, call that the "reading" time.

4. If a "reading" time is under some threshold call it "deleted".

That's how I did it a few years ago anyway.

zrgiu_• 15 years ago

i never load images automatically in my emails, and I bet a lot of other people do that too

derwiki3• 15 years ago

That's a neat trick. After hearing about Mirapoint, I built a simple proof of concept that uses time-delayed redirects to gauge how long a user has attempted to load an image:

https://github.com/derwiki/redirect_tracker

Like most email metrics, it's lacking -- but this is still -a little- more information, and that goes a long way in email marketing.

AznHisoka• 15 years ago

I need something like this. Great idea! Run with it!

aarlo4• 15 years ago

Thanks! Let me know what you think. aarlo@mirapost.com

phzbOx• 15 years ago

I'll be grumpy and say I'm surprised of how fast it reached first position on HN. However, I have to agree that there's a huge difference between deleting an email and opening it :p Great idea, good luck with it.

rorrr5• 15 years ago

Lies. There's no way to determine if an email got deleted (unless you somehow buy data from GMail, hotmail, yahoo mail, etc).

aarlo4• 15 years ago

Lie. If it was read for only a couple seconds, it's effectively a delete.

rorrr5• 15 years ago

Bullshit.

JonLim• 15 years ago

I would think that can be a wildly inaccurate statistic. Some people may click into the email, scan it within a second or two, and click out.

That would count as a delete?

anigbrowl• 15 years ago

This is why I block graphics, run mail in a separate browser instance etc. GTFO of my business.

derwiki3• 15 years ago

... but for the other 99.999% of people on the internet, this is more information to glean from email marketing campaigns.

molecule• 15 years ago

"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." - Bill Hicks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

Show HN: Email open rates are stupid.

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