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FAQ about opens and Gmail caching

I had hoped to blog about something else today, but this still seems to be a big concern for a number of people. There are a lot of questions running around, some of which we don’t have answers to, others of which we have answers based on some evidence.
It’s important to remember that we’ve seen Gmail roll things out and then roll things back and do phased transitions during deployment. What various people are reporting about images and caching and headers are accurate at the time they are tested. But they may not be accurate tomorrow or in a week or in a month.
I’ve also discovered through this process that a lot of different providers use significantly different image tracking in order to record image loads. Some of these techniques seem to be more resistant to Google’s new image loading process than others.
Why is this all so important?
Image tracking has become a fundamental part of email marketing. It’s something that can be measured, and so a lot of marketers evaluate the effectiveness of an email send based partially on open rate.
How does open tracking work?
For open tracking, ESPs inject a uniquely tagged image into the email. When the recipient opens an email and has images on, the email client calls to the sender server and asks the sender server for all the images in the email. When the tagged image is returned to the recipient, the server records an “open.”
How does caching break open tracking?
Caching means that only the first load of an image is provided by the sender’s server. Subsequent loads of an image are served by the caching proxy. Caching proxies are nothing new; they just haven’t affected email enough in the past for us to have to talk about it.
Why are some people reporting zero problems?
The first load of a unique image always happens. Some folks don’t measure repeat opens, so they’re not even noticing any changes in their reporting thus are saying they’re seeing no problems.
What else is image tracking used for?
Image tracking can also be used for device detection by reading the “user-agent” string that each device returns. Gmail is currently rewriting the “user-agent” string thus breaking all device detection. The string is unique enough that it would be possible to tag those opens as “opened through gmail web interface.” Gmail may decide to pass through the user agent in the future, the HTTP standard does allow for that.
Image tracking can also be used for geolocation. Some senders use the location of an IP address to return images relevant to a user’s location. The accuracy of geolocation is totally dependent on the accuracy of the IP to location database used; it is a best guess of the user’s location. Gmail is currently not passing through the user’s IP address when requesting the original image. I don’t expect them to start, given they also don’t reveal user IPs when Gmail web users send mail. This falls in the same category of privacy protection.
Is there a workaround?
I have heard of a few people claiming they have a fix. The problem is all of the fixes I have seen involve doing things that violate the HTTP RFCs. For instance, the “fix” or “workaround” discussed at E-Mail Marketing Tipps is to not send back an image at all. This is working now to track repeat opens, but Gmail may adapt and block this as well. It’s also possible that Gmail may decide people trying to “work around” Gmail’s cache should be blocked outright for violating the HTTP spec.
Where can I find more information?
Other blog posts on the issue, including research on what people have seen.

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More info about Gmail image caching

A lot of people are discussing the new Gmail image caching around the web.
This doesn’t yet appear to be rolled out across all of Google’s network, so some people in different parts of the world are reporting different behaviors. This is leading to a little bit of confusion, as folks are reporting things like seeing multiple opens for a single image. These reports are clearly accurate, but may only be an artifact of a slow rollout across the network.
There are a couple bullet points I think are important.

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Email against Humanity

“Sending an email is one of the worst things you can do to a person. You are stealing a little part of their life away. 99.99% of all emails are incredibly annoying and a huge imposition. If your job is to write emails, you should always be fighting to send fewer things and make sure each email you send is so incredible that it’s a rare treat to hear from you.”
Cards Against Humanity at MailChimp

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Gmail deploys image proxy servers

This afternoon Justin Foster of LiveClicker posted to the OnlyInfluencers list asking about Gmail rewriting links.

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Canada announces CASL regulation start date

This morning Industry Canada published its final regulations regarding the implementation of the Canadian Anti-Spam Law. Email related provisions of the law will take effect June 1, 2014.
What does this mean? It means that anyone sending mail from Canada or anyone sending mail that is accessed in Canada is required to have explicit opt-in consent for sending that mail, with a few exceptions. These exceptions include commercial electronic messages that are:

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Open relays

Spamhaus wrote about the return of open relays yesterday. What they’re seeing today matches what I see: there is fairly consistent abuse of open relays to send spam. As spam problems go it’s not as serious as compromised machines or abuse-tolerant ESPs / ISPs/ freemail providers – either in terms of volume or user inbox experience – but it’s definitely part of the problem.
I’m not sure how much of a new problem it is, though.
Spammers scan the ‘net for mailservers and attempt to relay email through them back to email addresses they control. Any mail that’s delivered is a sign of an open relay. They typically put the IP address of the mailserver they connected to in the subject line of the email, making it easy for them to mechanically extract a list of open relays.
We run some honeypots that will accept and log any transaction, which looks just like an open relay to spammers other than not actually relaying any email. They let us see what’s going on. Here’s a fairly typical recent relay attempt:

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SBCGlobal having a bad day

I’m seeing scattered reports of the SBCGlobal.net MTAs refusing connections. No current information about fixes.

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Private whois records hide spammers and help bring down a registrar

I’ve talked in the past about how many spam filters, ISPs and blocklists treat domains that are registered behind privacy protection. I’ve written about how many commercial domains behind privacy protection are used for fraud. I’ve written about multiple legal cases where the courts ruled against companies using privacy protected domains in email. I’ve even gone so far as to claim hiding domains behind privacy protection is what spammers do.
Legitimate email marketers do not hide their domains behind privacy protection services.
Spammers absolutely do hide behind privacy protection services. And because of how privacy protection works, we really don’t know which domains are used by one spammer versus another spammer. ICANN gave us a little bit of insight into just how many domains a spammer registers when they terminated Dynamic Dolphin (pdf link). This is a situation that has been brewing for most of 2013. I wrote about the notice of contract breach back in October. This morning Brian Krebs wrote a blog post saying that ICANN had terminated the agreement with Dynamic Dolphin for failing to cure the breach as noticed back in October.
If you read through the timeline, ICANN has some interesting information about privacy protected domains at Dynamic Dolphin. Data about privacy protected domains was requested from the very beginning.

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Do Gmail tabs hurt email marketing?

Earlier this year, Gmail rolled out a new way for users to organize their inbox: tabs. Tabs were an attempt by Gmail to help Gmail users organize their mail, particularly programmatically generated email like social media alerts and marketing mail. While many of us took a wait and see approach, a number of email marketers took this as one of the 7 signs of the apocalypse and the end of email marketing as we know it.
Dozens of marketers wrote article with such titles as “7 ways to survive Gmail tabs” and headlines that declared “Thanks to Gmail’s new tabs, promotional e-mails are now shunted off to a secondary inbox. If you rely on e-mail marketing, you should be worried.” Marketers large and small responded by sending emails to recipients begging them to move marketing mail out of the promotions tab and into the inbox.
A number of bloggers, reporters and marketers, myself included, tried to tame the panic. Not because we necessarily supported tabs, but because we really had no insight into how this would affect recipients interacting with email.
This week Return Path published a whitepaper on the effect of Gmail tabs on email marketing (.pdf link).
Not only did Return Path’s research show little negative effect of tabs, they actually saw some positive effects of tabs on how recipients interact with commercial email. Overall, the introduction of tabs in the gmail interface may be a improvement for email marketers.

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Hotmail having a bad day

Looks like Hotmail / Microsoft is having a rather bad day. Their DNS seems to be intermittent. While they were down a while ago they were returning SERVFAIL for some DNS lookups, including MX lookups.
For senders who have the DNS data in their recursive resolvers, this will have no impact. For senders who either don’t have the data cached or who have the data expire before the servers come back online there may be a transient increase in the number of bounces at Microsoft domains (Hotmail, Outlook, MSN.com, office365.com and the Microsoft corporate domains including microsoft.com and their other domains like xboxone.com).
 
 

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