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Ask HN: Does Email Open Rate not matter?

1 points by JCharante ↗ HN
Since 2015 I have been receiving 1-2 (sometimes 3) emails per week from CodeTriage about my Github integration being broken. This has resulted in 718 emails to my gmail that I have not opened.

I was under the impression that companies that send many emails would track the open % rate and automatically unsubscribe users that weren't opening their emails in order to not hurt their reputation.

It looks like they've been using sendgrid since at least 2015. Wouldn't sendgrid step in at some point?

4 comments

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jjgreen
"Open rates" are unreliable since they need the target to open the email as HTML, many don't (including me).
vinberdon
Not only that, but if your recipient has an iPhone and uses the Mail app (and a few other platforms now), the images are all loaded on Apple (or other) servers first as part of a privacy and safety process, registering as an Open. So it's even harder to tell if people are actually opening the emails or not.
clouddrover
Thunderbird blocks remote content by default. Thunderbird can also be configured to never send return receipts.
vinberdon
Open rates for tracked marketing/sales emails are almost always determined by an image with a unique URL being loaded in an HTML email. So if you load remote content, it'll register as an open even if read receipts are blocked.