I had an incident with Capital One sending me a letter in the mail saying that I hadn't read any email correspondence and they thought my email address was invalid. I have display images disables in Gmail.
Some mail delivery systems unsubscribe folks from (legitimate) distribution lists/newsletters once they determine that tracking pixels are not loaded for a while.
People implenting and using such a feature (from the sender side) should be fired on the spot.
I implemented such a feature and thought it was a good thing as we don't want to send marketing emails to those who aren't interested.
People will also enter in junk email addresses so it is to clear them out to keep your list clean.
Those who are interested in the email content and still have images turned off are rare in practice. Even then, I also checked for email clicks and logins for some redundancy.
> Those who are interested in the email content and still have images turned off are rare in practice.
How do you know this? Maybe you keep kicking them off your list and are misinterpreting your signal. What percentage of your addresses never phone home?
I think this is the point of the post as people assume this functionality works and make decisions.
It seems like a low cost to maintain people who subscribed but never loaded a tracker image.
Not sure your product, but I think people who turn on this feature are savvier than some users. So pruning them from your list would remove potentially lucrative customers.
I think this availability bias of data leads companies to doing some weird, suboptimal things. Like using Facebook in place of market research leaves out non-Facebook users, etc etc.
As with all things, this is a context where the important information was on-platform and the emails were opt-in subscriptions. YMMV.
> It seems like a low cost to maintain people who subscribed but never loaded a tracker image.
On the contrary. Each send costs. This adds up. It also adds cost to the overall processes involved due to unbounded growth in possible recipients.
Reputation with service providers is another concern. Google, for instance, will punish a sender's deliverability if enough recipients never open emails. Failing to clean your list impacts the ability to deliver to active users.
> What percentage of your addresses never phone home?
These were an extreme outlier. Such that it's simpler to send an email communicating the pending removal unless they opt-in.
> So pruning them from your list would remove potentially lucrative customers.
These decisions aren't made in a vacuum. Links themselves are also tracked. Those users also weren't actively clicking emails either.
On the system I was cleaning up, something like 20% of outbound emails had _zero_ engagement.
Aha! Now I know why I used to get these a lot from various financial services companies I'm a customer of. "Your email address doesn't seem to be valid." And yet I know for a fact that it is, because I get several emails a week from them. So I know they're not getting bounce messages; they're just trusting their stupid tracking pixels. And I've had images turned off in my email since HTML email became a thing.
