Keeping Track of campaign, strange behaviour from gmail

Question

I know question I am going to ask is not related to programming, but I dont know where to put this question so i am asking it here.

I am working on sending campaign to newslettersubscriber. I want to keep track of the email opened count to know the response from our customers. Technology I am using is ASP.NET MVC3 , SQL Server 2008. I have token in my email template(campaign) which is replaced by one specific url, which isDisplay images below image is downloaded.And method in my common controller is called and corresponding row is updated.

Now after this email is sent to customers. when i sent opened my own GMAIL inbox and opened this campaign. I inspected html element. but markup i saw was diffrent from my original url

Image

Is should <img src="http://www.mysite.com/common/EmailViewedNotificationHandler?id=30-E1663091-8849-442D-81C1-0DDE97771B55"

But interpreted as

<img   src="https://ci5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/WnpVRMliHHhtbOu6y6GmZD4l4kVePPdRWR4BTNQY_OLeQ2IFJOJHwuvy2qThpWJUQBKpA7hmf09pkxDfnfQCszDDs2YHfIWd3iqGRMpsD6cNXO0UTLf4BN6Cbj43KfDkaCVrlwIZl-B0y8LlrWvjaheDRhd_f2ryjpib_c8f4K4=s0-d-e1-ft#http://www.mysite.com/common/EmailViewedNotificationHandler?id=30-E1663091-8849-442D-81C1-0DDE97771B55"/>

This was the case for my first campaign but with second campaign event this url wasnt there it was only <img>

By Gmail

Any Solutions Thanks In Advance

Answer 1

This is new for Gmail but it pretty much screws you over for tracking an email campaign in Gmail. Google now caches images in emails and displays the cached versions to users (the URL you're seeing is to a Google caching server). This means that you will likely receive only one and exactly one request for each image in each email you send since Gmail will have to make a request to your server for the initial caching.

But to be honest you couldn't count on Gmail for accurate campaign tracking anyway since they moved to the "smart inbox" system that is supposed to automatically prioritize your inbox. I'm not sure what else Google has done to anger email marketers but the ones I work with really don't like Gmail.