The spam folder and opens
There’s a post getting a lot of traction in my LinkedIn feed from someone spreading misinformation about open rates. A bunch of deliverability colleagues have weighed in and pointed out some of the mistakes, but there’s one very big mis-statement I haven’t seen anyone correct. [1]
The person states (and it might be in a linked article, not in the actual LinkedIn post) that pre-fetching occurs even in the spam folder. This is wrong.
If your mail is in the spam folder then IMAGES ARE NOT LOADED. It’s exactly why we can use open rates at some providers to monitor how well we’re reaching the inbox.
If you think about it, it makes sense. The mailbox provider thinks the message might be a problem and delivers it to the spam folder. They don’t trust the sender enough to put the mail in the inbox, they’re certainly not going to then load any images. In fact, at places like gmail if you want to load images on a message in the spam folder, you need to move it out of the spam folder before you can.
Some of this goes back to the days when there was a LOT of porn spam with attached images. These were very NOT safe for work images. Anecdotally and apocryphally caused people to lose jobs because there was porn in their work mailbox and some supervisor happened to walk by a desk and see it. Many providers turned off automatic image loading completely - including Microsoft and AOL (yes, it was that long ago) to stop people from being visually assaulted with porn.
The point is: gmail is not pre-fetching images for mail that lands in the spam folder, no matter what you may have read on LinkedIn.
This actually started out as a rant about how you couldn’t trust anything on LinkedIn. That people sound very authoritative but may not know what they’re talking about. As with many social media sites, it’s a bit of a trainwreck at the moment. With a lot of bad, mis- and even dis- information being fed to people.
This post is, of course, guaranteed true because it’s not on LinkedIn. Well, OK, just being on the Internet doesn’t make anything true. In this case, though, you can test it yourself. Go to your Gmail spam folder. Are images loaded? Can you load them? Or do you have to move the mail to the inbox before you can load images?
We’ve written extensively about Open Rates. Steve did Deliveries, Opens and Clicks for Deliverability Week a few years ago and it’s one I send a lot of people to because he did such a great job. You can also check out the tags open opens, open rates, and open rate[2] to see other things we’ve written over the years.
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[1] and because I’m trying to be better about blogging, I’m going to blog about it instead of writing on LinkedIn.
[2] we have nearly 20 years of content and the tags are so, so messy and they need to be fixed and I just cannot summon up the energy to go do it.