You may get a ping that the email was viewed even if the recipient never opened it. Some software along the way might load the tracking image for some reason-for example, to provide a preview of the email or to scan everything in it. This is also true if the recipient is using software that blocks these tracking images. If the recipient is using an email client that’s set not to load images, the tracker won’t load, and you’ll have no way of knowing if that person looked at the email.
This email-opening tracking system can break in many ways. You can use software that embeds tracking images and reports to you when someone opens it, and you’ll know who looked at it. For example, let’s say you’re sending out a resume and you want to know who opened your job application emails. While this technique is used by companies, you can use it yourself. If a person never opens or interacts with our newsletter, we can remove them from the email list and stop sending it to them. Here at How-To Geek, we’ve used this type of tracking for our email newsletter to ensure that we’re only sending it to people who like looking at it. Companies that send out automated email newsletters like to know how many people are opening and reading them.Įveryone does this. There’s generally nothing sinister about this type of tracking. Lyft knows who received these ID numbers, so they know who opened the email when these images are loaded. These images are normally loaded when you open the email. This HTML code comes from an email announcement Lyft sent to me. But this only happens when you actually click a link, not just open an email. For example, each link in the email may have a unique identifier that’s tied to you so a company can see who clicked the links in the email. There are other ways to track that you might have opened an email, too. When that specific image is loaded from the company’s servers, they know the email sent to your email address was just opened. When you open the email newsletter, and it loads images (even if you can’t see any images), it loads an image with a unique address. These images are also known as “web beacons.”
Each person who receives a copy of the email newsletter has a unique tracking image address in it. This is a tiny invisible image file that’s only a single pixel in size, also known as a 1×1 image. But they usually load images by default.Ĭompanies that send email newsletters and other automated emails almost always include a special tracking image. You can tell your email client never to load images if you want. When you open an email, your email client loads the images in that email from the remote server and displays them, just as when you open a web page.
They can also load images, which is how the tracking works. But you’re not just sending a text message to someone-emails can contain HTML code, like on web pages. In theory, email is a very simple medium.
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