Yes, if that newsletter is using best practices. The recommended period is 90 days I believe, but you can get send an email asking if you're still interested (and in that email, there will be a link you should click if you want to stay subscribed).

You may have had this happen before and probably thought that was just a scammy way to get you to click a link, but in fact it's completely legit.

> Yes, if that newsletter is using best practices.

Clearly that would be worst possible practices.

Don’t understand the downvotes. I block all the images by default so I assume I’ve been a victim of such a “best practice”. Also with hey.com auto blocking spy pixels I just don’t see how this is still a best practice

I would not consider it "best practices" to automatically unsubscribe someone who legitimately subscribed. Have a double opt-in, and then assume they're interested until they explicitly unsubscribe.

I'm subscribed to some mailinglist that I don't actually read but would be upset if they auto-unsubscribed me, because if I'm ever interested, I want it to be there.

What I described is literally listed under "best practices for bulk senders" by Gmail. These are hoops I'm not fond of jumping through either, obviously, but if Gmail marks all my email as spam I lose 4000 subscribers overnight so I do what big G asks me to do.

I checked and found this: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en

It doesn't mention pixels anywhere, though.

It does contain the line:

> "Consider unsubscribing users who don’t read your messages."

But that's only after lots of mention of opt-in and unsubscribe options. And ultimately, you can't really know whether users read your messages or not.

Tracking pixels are the closest we have to determining whether somebody opens (& hopefully reads) the email. Click rate is the next best thing but unless you are an incredible marketer it will be far below open rate, possibly 1/4 or less. What Google is implying there is to use tracking images and automatically unsubscribe users that don't load them after several messages.

Google is not explicitly saying to use tracking images. That might be the only possible implementation of this advice, but they're not explicitly telling you to do this. Also, consider their use of the word "consider". It's not a hard rule to them.

And personally, I still think it's a bad idea to automatically unsubscribe people who are interested in your newsletter merely because they're not loading images. At the very least, make it very explicit that you're going to do this, and maybe give them the option to turn the auto-unsubscribe off.

I'm glad you agree that it is indeed considered a best practice to automatically unsubscribe someone who legitimately subscribed, when they don't read your emails.

I guess blindly assuming that I agree fits the pattern here. I was actually pointing out that you cannot know whether they read your emails or not. Unsubscribing them before they don't load remote images is not the same thing, and is making a lot of assumptions that will be false for a lot of people.

What else do you think Gmail means, when they give those recommendations?

Using a tracking pixel isn't perfect, but like what peter said in another comment somewhere here, it's the best we've got. If you want to implement Gmail's (and other ISPs) best practices, then you need to do tracking of engagement. Just because you don't like it, does not mean that is not considered best practice. Just because it won't be 100% perfect, does not mean it's not considered best practice.

You may disagree that it should happen, but you cannot factually say it is not a best practice.

But email clients let you set “do not load remote images”. I set it for the Mac app. How can a best practice be one that conflicts with easily toggled options and not weird settings.

Feel free to complain to Google, Yahoo et al about this. I'm just the messenger and engineer who needs to cater to their rules or risk getting kicked out.

I don't load tracking pixels and I've never had it happen to me that I got unsubscribed because of that. I would be quite upset and would not consider it "best practise" - quite the contrary!