from Hacker News

Please also stop tracking email open events Zoom

by techthumb on 4/27/20, 7:28 PM with 4 comments

Hey Zoom,

As part of you clean up, could you please also stop tracking email opens?

<img src="http://email.zoom.us/track/open.php?u=30854053&id=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" height="1" width="1">

  • by sethammons on 4/27/20, 10:30 PM

    Tracking email opens allows senders to gauge engagement with sends, giving them feedback such as non-engaged users. When users don't engage with the emails, inboxes can penalize the senders. By having open data, it helps senders trim off non-engaged users to keep their mail relevant for interested recipients.

    Genuine question: what's the bad part of tracking opens? The only thing I can think of is "I just don't want them to know I opened it." Which, I guess is fair. But in the current email landscape, that means inboxes like Gmail may start sending more legit mail to spam boxes due to bad engagement metrics on their end.

  • by Hackbraten on 4/27/20, 7:29 PM

    Shenanigans like these made me disallow remote image requests in my email client.