
Fab stops sending you emails you don’t read, even when you don’t ask them to - maxmzd_
http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/03/04/classy-fab-stops-sending-you-emails-you-dont-read-even-when-you-dont-ask-them-to/?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=share%2Bbutton&utm_content=Fab%20stops%20sending%20you%20emails%20you%20don%E2%80%99t%20read%2C%20even%20when%20you%20don%E2%80%99t%20ask%20them%20to&utm_campaign=social%2Bmedia
======
chris_j
I received a similar email a few months ago. I was rather annoyed to receive
it, to be honest, because I _had_ been reading the emails. Just with images
disabled.

~~~
bthomas
Is there a way to detect whether user has read an email with the standard
Gmail image filter enabled?

~~~
encoderer
Where I work we run a batch job that looks for inbound clicks from an email
without a corresponding "email opened" tracking pixel being fired. Gives us an
idea of how many people are engaging with images turned off or some other form
of tracking pixel blocking.

Our analytics wizards then use that and other data to come up with some
estimates on how many users are opening our emails with images disabled.

~~~
nwh
Could you share any rough statistics?

~~~
WillyF
On my list of about 11,500, just under 400 people have "opened never" but have
clicked at least one link. So it's a pretty small number. I'd be you can just
about double it to get the total number of opens that haven't been tracked.

------
betterunix
It sounds like the emails were mostly HTML mail that fetched external images.
HTML mail is a terrible thing that should be stopped, and HTML mail that
fetches anything external is a security problem. It's nice to know that these
Fab people were thinking about their customers, but the bigger picture here is
that HTML mail was being abused to violate those same customers' privacy. It
may have been for a good reason, but it was still a bad thing to do and
legitimizing the practice will make it easier to carry out attacks via email.

The solution to inbox clutter is filtering. If users are too lazy to make
filters, then the problem is with the effort required to make filters.

~~~
encoderer
Obviously you're entitled to your opinion.

But I think the fact that users opt-in to HTML emails and engage with them far
more frequently than text opt-in and engagement indicates that your opinion is
an outlier.

I _like_ HTML email. I opt-in only to companies that interest me enough to do
so. Those times when I'm opted-in accidentally by not unchecking a box or
whatever during checkout I just unsubscribe from and move on. What I have left
is useful content in my inbox, some of it more directly sales oriented, the
rest more generally informational.

Similarly, for certain senders, I chose to tell Gmail to always load their
images — including tracking pixels. It's not a violation of my privacy any
more than the numerous pixels on any other website I read.

~~~
betterunix
I have little doubt that I am an outlier, since most users have no idea what
HTML even is. I am doubtful that people are truly "opting in" to receive
email; it seems more likely that they were not paying attention to the "yes by
default" checkbox.

HTML mail itself is a security problem. It has been used for fairly
sophisticated phishing attacks in the past:

[http://blog.mxlab.eu/2010/03/13/phishing-emails-with-
attache...](http://blog.mxlab.eu/2010/03/13/phishing-emails-with-attached-
html-forms-instead-of-embedded-urls/)

It is almost certainly being used for phishing attacks now. It makes it
difficult to give users visual cues about which emails can be trusted, since
the sender could have embedded HTML in the message to present that same queue.
An attacker might give the user the idea that a message was digitally signed
by using HTML mail.

Security with HTML mail is a serious enough concern that the DoD will
sometimes convert all incoming HTML mail to plaintext as a precaution:

[http://it.slashdot.org/story/06/12/24/1922216/department-
of-...](http://it.slashdot.org/story/06/12/24/1922216/department-of-defense-
now-blocking-html-email)

"It's not a violation of my privacy any more than the numerous pixels on any
other website I read."

In other words, it is a violation of your privacy. The fact that it is a
common practice on the web does not somehow make it less of a violation.

~~~
eric-hu
> In other words, it is a violation of your privacy. The fact that it is a
> common practice on the web does not somehow make it less of a violation.

So...the web at large violates people's privacy. I can agree to that, but I
prefer a world where everyone has easy access to large amounts of information.

If the available communication mediums are only those that are secure but
difficult to use, then the ecosystems of many sites would be much smaller. I
can't imagine trying to browse Facebook or Yelp over a TOR connection. It's
feasible but annoying to me. That tells me most of my friends and family would
simply consider this process unfeasible and not use it.

~~~
betterunix
You know, there was a time when browsing the web did not entail constant
violations of your privacy. The web has always been open and has always been
giving people easy access to information, since its very inception; the
assault on privacy came later, when greedy advertisers showed up and took
advantage of security problems and user ignorance.

While Tor is fairly annoying for most people (even myself), other privacy-
protecting systems are less annoying. I have yet to hear someone complain
about using ABP, which I would classify as privacy protecting (it blocks a
large number of common tracking systems). I suspect nobody would complain
about Firefox blocking tracking cookies by default either.

Really, we can live in a world where privacy is respected if we are willing to
do so and willing to deploy the necessary technologies. One of my side
projects is to develop a system that allows targeted ads to be delivered in a
privacy-preserving fashion, so that advertisers can know which ads are
successful without knowing whether any individual person actually viewed or
clicked on their ads (using cryptographic techniques). My point is that there
is _no need to violate privacy_ and that better technologies can be developed
and deployed.

~~~
encoderer
You know, the "Greedy Advertisers" showed up when "Greedy Website Operators"
decided that they didn't want to pay out of pocket to provide people with
information. And that, actually, they'd like to make a buck or two doing it.

The web today has far more information and functionality than ever before.
Much of this free to me because of advertising.

You act like the advertisers some how force things down your throat. If you
don't want to deal with advertising, the answer is simple: Avoid websites that
rely on advertising dollars.

~~~
betterunix
"Avoid websites that rely on advertising dollars."

Or plan B: ABP.

~~~
encoderer
So you're THAT type.

You feel entitled enough to just take what you want from a website while they
pay the cost for your traffic.

Well, go ahead with that. And justify yourself with your "greedy advertisers
ruined everything and violate my privacy" BS.

Feel free to have the last word here.

~~~
ubercow13
ABP is one of the first things I install on friends' computers which I have
had to remove malware from. I genuinely think, for normal non-techy users, it
is probably one of the most effective and simple methods of stopping people
accidentally giving themselves problems.

Obviously this isn't because of the nice sites with good content which just
want to make some money from their effort, it's generally because of less
legitimate sites. But I think the idealogical argument of "these content
providers deserve to get paid" just falls into irrelevance for these people
when the alternative is protecting their computers, privacy, safety online,
and of course their time.

As an ABP user who uses it mainly to make my internet experience nicer, I can
take the time to unblock websites which I agree I should be supporting or
reimbursing somehow for the content they have provided me, but most people
would never take the time to do this, and for them the best solution seems to
me to be blocking all ads where possible.

------
petercooper
I did something similar with my Ruby Weekly list (basically removed 1000 folks
from a 18,000 list) and sent a message saying what I'd done and invited them
to resubscribe if I'd got it wrong and.. I got quite a few nasty mails. People
ranting that they read with images off or saying that I didn't appreciate
their subscription if they didn't click on things, etc. Nonetheless, open
rates did improve significantly.

Lesson learned.. if I do it again, I won't send the mail telling people I have
;-)

------
mpyne
I wonder how they track this? I haven't been able to attend any local Meetups
for example (and sometimes just delete the email outright), but this is one of
the few I want to keep receiving because, you know, someday I'll have time...

~~~
shabble
There are a few sneaky ways in addition to the per-user URL tracking image
people have mentioned. There was some internet drama about facebook (ab)using
bgsound attribute of html mail to detect even when people have disabled image
viewing.

ReadNotify (as reviewed by jgrahamc[2]) also seems to use similar tricks,
including loading remote resources via css url() and similar.

[1] [http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-uses-bgsound-
to-...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-uses-bgsound-to-see-if-
you-opened-an-e-mail/10003)

[2] <http://blog.jgc.org/2006/10/peek-inside-readnotify.html>

~~~
LandoCalrissian
I don't really understand how the background css url() one is any different
than using a tracking pixel, don't all client block background along with
normal images?

~~~
shabble
I guess it might just be a bug in some (web-)mail clients which just stripped
<img>, ... tags or something rather than all potentially url-referenced
assets. Not certain though.

------
WillyF
Fab uses Sailthru to deliver their e-mail. See here:
<https://www.sailthru.com/clients>

I'm in the process of moving my e-mail to Sailthru. I'm really impressed by
their capabilities, though the transition hasn't been quite as smooth as I
would have liked. I'm finally starting to dive into doing stuff like this, and
I'm really excited about using data to improve the experience from people who
get my daily e-mails.

Not only can I stop bothering people who are no longer reading my e-mails, but
I can also cut costs by removing users who aren't engaged. It's a win-win.

~~~
pyre

      | removing users who aren't engaged
    

...and people that _were_ reading your emails, but use a method that breaks
their tracking methods. :P

~~~
WillyF
That's why you send a warning e-mail. You could also opt them down to a weekly
digest instead of daily e-mails.

One good thing about Sailthru is that it you can track all clicks on links. So
if you have a user with no opens and no clicks over a few months, you have a
lot more certainty that they're not reading (especially if your e-mails have a
considerable amount of links).

------
zaidf
It isn't universally accepted that regular unread emails provide no value to
the company or user.

There is a whole argument about how even if you don't open emails, just seeing
the name of the company in your inbox increases recall value so tomorrow when
you do have a need for a pair of shoes, you'll more likely check out the
company that's been emailing you daily than a company you haven't heard about
much.

~~~
AJ007
There is some idea that this impacts email inbox rates, at least with certain
large ISPs. I do something similar, but its based on if the person has not
clicked on anything in the e-mail for a while.

If your not on Amazon SES paying tiny 10 cent CPMs, then there is some
financial incentive to throttle your sending back a bit too.

~~~
jchin
I've seen marketing blog articles that claim unopened emails affect inbox
rates but I've never seen any numerical evidence nor heard it from someone who
worked at a large ISP. Do you have any of those resources?

------
dminor
We've done this too, and the reason is this: dropping people who don't read
your newsletter _increases_ your open rate, and _decreases_ your spam reports.
This makes it less likely some large mail host will drop your newsletter
entirely.

The reason you send an email is for people who don't turn on images or click
on links, but still want your newsletter.

~~~
jchin
I can understand the removing non-readers can decrease your spam reports
because I have seen numbers where a significant number of non-openers hit the
spam button. However, do you have any evidence that an increased open rate
helps your deliverability? There seem to be lots of people claiming unopened
emails are bad for you but I have not heard anything like that from someone on
the inside like someone at Gmail?

~~~
dminor
We've read it from various experts, but you have a point - I don't think it's
been said directly by any mail hosts. They tend not to say much on the subject
though.

------
hissworks
Fab is notoriously bad about email delivery. It's become a joke between my
girlfriend and I that when one of our phone buzzes it "must be Fab again". I
can't recall how I ended up on their lists but I believe it was due to some
competition.

------
estsauver
This actually seems like a great idea. I remember reading that your spam score
is in part based on email open rates, by dumping users who have no chance of
opening you decrease your likelihood of getting blocked for a campaign.

It also has the nice benefit of publicity and reduced mailchimp/other provider
fees.

On second thought, I'm not sure if any of these would offset the cost per
acquisition of even a few users who were accidentally "let go" by this tactic.
I hope fab posts some statistics at some point.

------
mistermcgruff
The crappy thing is that some clients (Apple Mail) download images even if you
haven't opened the email, so Fab would _think_ you're opening all the sends.
But if you moved over to a better sign of engagement like clicking on an
encoded URL, then you might be throttling sends to some folks who are actually
opening.

I wonder where Fab landed in this discussion.

~~~
espadagroup
Hey, on the marketing team at Fab. We know that a lot of people love to purely
just open our emails because they are pretty visual and there is a huge part
of discovery; they might not always see something they like and thus click. We
thought the risk of opting out these people outweighed the risk of
accidentally leaving in people with clients like Apple Mail.

------
cardine
At first I thought this was for a startup that offers this service. I don't
know if I'd use it, but it seems like a pretty cool offering someone could
easily code up - have it detect what types of emails you don't read and then
automatically send those emails into another folder.

------
jsiegz
Most major daily e-mail sites do this, they just don't always send an
additional e-mail to let the customer know that they do it.

Basically, it's best practice to auto-unsubscribe users who never open their
e-mails to reduce risk of being marked as spam after a while.

~~~
stevenou
Yeah I work for a daily email site and we do this too. We just don't send
another email letting them know - that's more spam! I was surprised that this
was considered newsworthy... Most people in the industry do this. It's
definitely considered best-practice - it reduces costs, improves metrics, and
probably doesn't subtract much value compared how much it costs to keep
sending them emails.

~~~
trotsky
You'd be surprised at how little most startup focused journalists know about
the day to day of the industry. If it hasn't been touted in a press release or
mentioned at an investors conference they probably don't know about it.

------
yRetsyM
I would love it if this option was offered by the providers such as Mailchimp
and Campaign Monitor et all. They have the opportunity to improve their
industry and in turn improve clients business.

The tracking is already happening. Put it to good use!

~~~
duck
I know MailChimp has an article on how to do this in a managed/safe way:
[http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/how-can-i-remove-someone-
fro...](http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/how-can-i-remove-someone-from-my-list-
who-has-never-opened-a-campaign)

------
signed0
By tracking whether or not you read an email via a tracking image I imagine...

~~~
ben0x539
Is your email client really set up to phone home to the sender to retrieve
additional images when it opens an email? Doesn't that strike you as an
information leak/privacy issue?

~~~
signed0
Mine (Gmail) is not, but many (Outlook, OSX Mail) allow this by default. The
URL of the tracking image contains a number or hash that is used to uniquely
identify the person opening up the email.

~~~
corresation
Outlook hasn't done this by default for at least two if not three versions
now. However if you read a heavily stylized with images email you'll almost
certainly tell it to download images (just as one does in gmail), giving them
that feedback that they want.

~~~
signed0
Good to know, it's been several years since I used Outlook.

------
tommccabe
This isn't just good will towards the consumer; retailers are paying per
e-mail that is sent out, so it is good practice to prune the list of addresses
that haven't opened e-mails in a while.

------
aviswanathan
The issue for me is that every unread email is a to-do item for me. So I often
just click on an unread email without reading it just to mark it read.

~~~
tg3
I used to use unread emails as my to-do list. I recently started using
Mailbox, and have embraced the Inbox Zero philosophy of every email in my
inbox (regardless of read status) as a to-do item.

I've found that nearly everything I do with email works better this way.

------
tomwalsham
This is definitely good email sender behaviour, but I would hesitate to purely
put this down to the altruistic notion of 'keeping your inbox tidy' - Inbox
Zero is a problem fairly isolated to the Newserati and similar thin slices of
population.

Fact is, Email Deliverability is increasingly engagement-driven these days,
especially with the major ISPs, and additionally sending email costs money.

\--

At its most basic level, a sender's 'spamminess' is determined by percentage
of spam reports against overall deliveries from that IP. Levels over 1% put
your reputation in the 'severe' category, and risk lack of inbox delivery,
blacklists and more. Having more engaged users leads to a better ratio - for
this reason alone keeping your recipients 'fresh' is valuable.

Additionally, another common pattern of email (or more correctly a
sender:template combination) falling into the 'spam' category for an ISP is to
see a few percentage points in drop, followed by a complete /dev/null-ing.
When the initial drop happens, whether or not your recipients correct that as
a false-positive will determine whether you get the Full Monty. Naturally
therefore removing the least engaged users has a significant beneficial effect
on overall deliverability.

These days though, it's getting more complex, nuanced and ultimately more
individual.

Gmail moved some time back from a centralized concept of 'spam' to a much more
personal view by using your positive and negative engagement signals: opens,
clicks, replies, 'delete without reading','report spam' etc. They explicitly
modify the visibility of email in your personal inbox through the 'important'
flag
([http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...](http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=186543)),
but there is good evidence that negative engagement can carry an email all the
way to the spam box for a given user and consequently affect the overall
deliverability.

This has a strong benefit for Gmail in that they become much harder to 'game'
- something Google Search team also has plenty of experience in avoiding. They
essentially eschew the classic SMTP 5xx return codes for 'Accept All, Ask
Questions Later' in all but the most egregious cases, and provide little to no
feedback for senders to troubleshoot delivery problems on the basis that if
your users want your mail, it would be getting through.

\--

The second primary motivator here (still with me?) is that sending email also
has a non-zero cost which is almost entirely driven by sheer subscriber count
and delivery attempts.

Consider a typical mass-marketing email with a 10-15% open rate, delivered
multiple times a month. Even assuming a varied engagement profile that mailer
is engaging with at most 50% of their list over the month. A simple list of
1MM recipients would incur an increased cost of a couple of thousand dollars a
month to send into the vacuum of disinterest.

There is, in certain circumstances, a benefit to be gained from 'eyeballs on
subjects' for brand awareness, but that metric is near impossible to track,
and as mentioned above unopened emails can be deleterious to your overall
delivery to the more engaged segments.

For both the reasons highlighted above, mass-market email has been using the
're-engagement' method (breathlessly described in the OP as a customer-driven
action), to keep their lists fresh and costs down.

I do applaud the application of metrics to provide intelligent subscription
management. At PostageApp we see the best delivery rates come from our clients
who take active interest in the concept of humans at the end of the SMTP pipe.
The growing provision of engagement data through APIs is helping drive
solutions like FAB's, and the end result is a better experience for the user.
That said, this particular innovation came not from the consumer-friendly high
visibility consumer and SaaS markets, but has been around for many years in
the risk-heavy line treading bulk marketing industry.

~~~
twerquie
Cool story bro

------
gadders
They just spam the living shit out of your facebook page instead in my
experience.

------
SODaniel
Are you sure? I am getting AT LEAST one email a day from them and never read
them.

------
dutchbrit
Should save them a lot of money removing the non active subscribers :)

