Your work mailing lists only have accurate stats if all of the recipients currently enable loading of images by default.

I don't think you're being sincere in your concern.

No one in the industry believes that open rate is 100% accurate, or even 50% accurate. It doesn't need to be. It's a directional measure: Which subject lines have better open rate, how does open rate decline as you send more frequently, which mailing lists or demographics have better open rates to the same email, etc.

"opens" for email messages have never been super accurate, since downloading images isn't on by default in more than just Gmail - your desktop mail client may have the same settings - who knows?

Because of this, any real interaction with an email message - where the user has to interact with the content, could then be counted as an, "open". If you get any other interaction with the message - say a user clicks a URL (that is also tracked), you just look and see if an, "open" was also recorded for this message, for this user - and, if not: record an open.

You'll still get instances when opens happen in messages, that aren't tracked, since no other interaction is done - there's that inaccuracy. But, if no other interaction is done, might as not count it as an open, anyways. Perhaps we should rename, "open" track as, "was this person, at all engaged, in the slightest?"

You can also then just give that a ranking: opened, clicked x amounts of links, followed through with a sale, DIDN'T unsubscribed - good rank!

Not sure why your "work mailing list" needs open tracking. Unless by "work mailing list" you mean "spam".

> which they will sell ...

Citation? I was not aware of this.

He is only assuming. Since this is new, and the info was free to begin with, there might not be anything against this in the privacy policy? but I don't want to read the whole policy to find out.

Google's an advertising company. Selling eyeballs -- or information on how to get more eyeballs -- is what they do.

> Selling eyeballs -- or information on how to get more eyeballs -- is what they do.

Selling eyeballs: yes.

Selling information: oh good lord no, so very, very no. That information is never ever leaving Google's servers.

If it leaves or doesn't leave Google servers we can't really know but the facts are: -Google has this information -They are marketing company with incentives to monetize it

Imo it's enough to be a bad thing. We can't rely on good will of companies to fight incentives and money in the name of privacy of their users.

You don't have to rely on "good will". Even if you are super pessimistic "companies only want money", Google will never sell or give up that data to other companies. That data is literally Google's lifeblood. That data is why companies use AdSense to advertise with instead of Bing Ads. That data is Google's competitive edge.

Even the evilest of companies isn't going to sell off its competitive edge, that's just idiotic.

Also you are wrong, Google is not a marketing company. Google is a middle man company. Google matches marketers to consumers. THAT is Google's business. Google is paid to be a match maker, nothing more.

Until the NSA gets to it.

Or until, years and years from now, someone buys Google.

when gmail will be as quaint as a model-T

Why aren't you asking for read-receipts if that's what's desired? If it's because people wouldn't send them, shouldn't that be their choice?

The vast majority of people don't care at all about read receipts.

Marketers don't care who _isn't_ reading their mail, they care how to send mail that more people will read.

Who subscribes to a direct email campaign (and doesn't unsubscribe, and doesn't flag as spam), and is still offended by the thought of the sender knowing it was read?

Those people can flip the setting back to prompt-to-show-images.

Not too different from them removing actual referrer URLs from Google Analytics.

Basically the same thing they do with keyword (not provided). You can get the referring keyword via adwords but not analytics with organic search. So if you pay for adwords you can see what keywords your users are clicking but if you don't pay then no data for you. Google only cares about user privacy when they can sell the data.

Google is starting to emulate the bullying tactics of Microsoft during its hey day. Don't be evil. not so much, I say.

Devil you know.