Gmail is opening and caching URLs within emails without user intervention (2019)

Re:Gmail is opening and caching URLs within emails without u... by prepend on Friday August 20, 2021 @08:44AM (#28245353)

It’s pretty easy to measure. I had a site with a verification step. And we would see like 20% drop off of people who clicked on the link but never confirmed. Not sure why. We didn’t have them copy and paste anything, just click a confirm button.

Switching to no confirm obviously changed this to 0% drop off of people who clicked the link, but the number of people who clicked was the same.

It was curious to me why people wouldn’t go through with the confirmation step, but never learned why. We just learned that for some reason more people click once instead of twice.

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Re:Gmail is opening and caching URLs within emails without u... by acdha on Friday August 20, 2021 @10:04AM (#28246107)

How would you have known if that 20% were real people and not bot activity?

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Re:Gmail is opening and caching URLs within emails without u... by prepend on Friday August 20, 2021 @02:21PM (#28249549)

I don’t necessarily. But they have active accounts that do stuff and had the drop off activity consistent with “normal users.”

So it doesn’t matter to me if they were bots or not.

For example, 100 users clicked on the first link, 80 completed, and had normal account activity (clicking on stuff, uploading and downloading things, etc).

100 users clicked on the second link and then had normal account activity.

Maybe they were all bots, but they seemed human based on the “normal activity.”

[ Parent | on HN ]