3

I'm having a problem with Amazon's SES Open Tracking and Gmail accounts.

When I send an email to gmail account through SES, sometimes I'll receive an Open click event immediately, when I know the email hasn't been opened. That is a very bad thing because we have to have precise metrics.

I've read some things about google image proxying, don't know if it has something to do with that, there was nothing conclusive.

The open tracking object comes with this data: ipAddress: 66.249.89.16 userAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.246 Mozilla/5.0 timestamp: 2019-07-09T19:14:31.494Z

Any ideas why this is happening?

alexandresaiz
  • 2,678
  • 7
  • 29
  • 40
Tomaz Fernandes
  • 2,429
  • 2
  • 14
  • 18
  • A bit old, but seems to explain the behaviour: [Gmail deploys image proxy servers | Word to the Wise](https://wordtothewise.com/2013/12/gmail-deploys-image-proxy-servers/). I think it was implemented to specifically stop the ability for senders to track Open events. – John Rotenstein Jul 09 '19 at 22:43

2 Answers2

3

I've noticed these as well. Before I even received a delivered report. Seems like google is loading the tracker pixel on a server somewhere before even delivering it to the recipient inbox. I'm filtering out these events by useragent. This blog post does a great job explaining: https://www.gmass.co/blog/false-opens-in-gmail/ It will help when you have to tell clients that their open rates have been inflated.

Kathryn Jackson
  • 31
  • 2
  • Hi Kathryn, thanks for the reply! What user agent do you filter out? We’re thinking of implement our own open tracking system using a bgsound to ping our server, we’ve seen other companies successfully doing that. – Tomaz Fernandes Aug 31 '19 at 16:24
  • @TomazFernandes I think the article references this user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.246 Mozilla/5.0 – Tristan Tao Feb 03 '21 at 00:21
0

The open email event is checked by most isp's with a transparent pixel injected within the body of the email. There's some users who have "auto load images" disabled in Gmail thus SES doesn't know about the "Open email event" as the pixel never loads on the browser of the recipient. Having an open notification when the email hasn’t been opened at all is very rare.

alexandresaiz
  • 2,678
  • 7
  • 29
  • 40