The article is quite specific in why Mozilla wants to track emails - email being sent to dead email accounts causes greylisting/blacklisting problems for them; they want to be able to unsubscribe inactive accounts, and the only way to determine account inactivity is through some sort of feedback mechanism.
"an acceptable compromise has been found, and the text-only option will remain. But, once a year, those subscribers will get a message asking them to click on a link to confirm their continued interest in remaining on the list. That should allow Mozilla to prune its inactive readers"
So that's exactly what Mozilla actually ended up doing.
Making spam lists opt-in? I'm pretty sure there's some kind of secret blood oath amongst marketing types that none shall ever make it simpler or more convenient to get off a mailing list, let alone making it harder to stay on one.
If the email account is dead, sender (Mozilla in this case) will get an error reply such as "550 No such account", etc.
When that happens, obviously, Mozilla should stop sending to that account.
The way most people solve this is with a unique code attached to some tracking pixel that gets picked up when the HTML email is opened. We use an alternate of embedding the unique code in the links for the email so that even a text only email will trigger a click for that user if they copy/paste the link. You lose "open" tracking, but this isn't too bad unless you are selling ad impressions for your emails.
And how many email users load images by default? How many of Mozilla's more technical demographic?
If I legitimately want emails from you (Mozilla seems likely) and you stop sending them, I'm going to be irritated. But if you stop because your phone home 1x1.gif doesn't load, that doesn't mean I wasn't reading them.
At least for my site, we consider multiple channels of engagement when calculating whether a user who is subscribed to something is active enough to bother messaging. If you don't click/open the emails (as far as our tracking can tell), but your account still opens our app, you'll keep on getting email updates until you unsubscribe via the unsub link, the profile preferences, or you close your account.
Mozilla is probably in a bit weirder position because their value-prop isn't in curating articles and videos the user is interested in. They don't require the users to login to use Firefox, and thus can't know if text-only users are using their emails unless they process unique ids on links inside the email (and that's the last step of the usual funnel, which means the segment definition is going to have to be really long (probably a year)).
If you don't copy/paste a link from any email within a year you end up falling off the "active users" segment and we stop wasting our time sending you emails. For text-only users (which we seem to have a few who have "clicks" but no "opens"). The particular system I work with is actually slightly more sophisticated and considers usage from a lot of channels (push message consumption, email opens and clicks, app usage, alexa usage, bot interactions, and website usage). If you don't do any of those things you fall into less and less frequent push/email interactions until we stop bothering with routine newsletter/updates messages except for an occasional "please come back"-style campaign.
"Copy/paste" here means "Copy the URL, paste it into the address field of a Web user-agent program, and initiate navigation to that URL in that Web user-agent program".
I suspect the phrasing was used since the discussion is about text-only email and, this being Hacker News, someone might have nit-picked that they view plaintext emails in a mail user agent program which does not scan for strings matching the format of a URL and offer a direct way to click on them or otherwise trigger automated opening of them in a Web user-agent program, and so the person who wrote "copy/paste" had to avoid saying "click on the link".
Copy pasting into the browser to view the link triggers this, just copying doesn't. If I understood the previous comment correctly, the author copies links into the browser instead of clicking them (since they aren't clickable links).
No bounce. My reading of the article is that the problem is with accounts that are still valid, but inactive. If you send a lot of mail to such accounts, e-mail providers flag you as spammy, apparently.
...which is remarkable because the email providers are the ones who are keeping the accounts open.
All they need to do is internally maintain a list of dormant accounts (as defined by not connecting to read email in some period of time); send a series of warnings to those accounts; stop accepting email for those accounts; at some point, delete the accounts and let mail bounce. Document the policy and the timeline.
What am I leaving out? Oh, forwarding accounts. Let the user mark them as forwarding accounts and change the "dead" heuristic to spot when all mail sent by the account's rules is bouncing.
I suppose that might cut the statistical boasting a bit (12 billion active users!) but at this point nobody has any sympathy for marketing departments anyway.
Email providers track "engagement", not just overall account activity. Plenty of "marketing" messages are sent to still active account and just go undread. Enough of this will cause messages to be routed to the bulk/spam folder.
I doubt this explanation. I have personally seen spamhaus blacklist a newsletter that was subscribed to using double opt-in. What happened: the e-mails never bounced, the provider just closed down and - what a "coincidence" - the domain ended up being owned by someone who immediately used it as a "spam honeypot" for spamhaus.
It's apparently impossible to protect a sender against this by other means than detecting real user interaction. Alternatively, blacklist providers doing this could be ignored...
That's exactly the end result they came to (again, explained in the article). "But, once a year, those subscribers will get a message asking them to click on a link to confirm their continued interest in remaining on the list."
That's what bounces are for. If email is deliverable, it is going to an "active" account. There are several mailing lists I retain for posterity, since I've seen a good handful of them simply disappear along with the archives.
Maybe they should limit this measure only to receivers which have a known reputation of downgrading senders of unopened mail.
Consider a user who just keeps clicking "mark as junk" until he stops seeing Mozilla mails, instead of unsubscribing. Or an overzealous system that marked a Mozilla mail as junk once, and nobody complained, so it keeps doing it. The user's account still exists and mail can still be delivered so there's no bounce response, but each mail Mozilla sends will be treated as evidence that Mozilla is spamming.
Isn't this what "List-Unsubscribe" header is for? The email client should display Unsubscribe option instead of Mark as junk or offer to unsubscribe first.
Many people block tracking pixels (by not loading images) anyway, so it doesn't completely make sense. Is the plan to automatically unsubscribe everyone who doesn't load images in emails?
So it seems, the conclusion here after all that's happened in the past few months is that modern Mozilla is no longer a privacy-first company when they're inconvenienced by that stance. Their rallying cry is now nothing more than "we're not as bad as Google".
What a sad state of affairs for the Internet in general.
For me, the alarming fact is that this "privacywise" option was not the firs one chosen. Instead, they went with a "privacyunwise" option as a default, and only backed out because of user uproar. Bad Mozilla!
I strongly suggest you look at the actual discussion that happened [1].
One Mozilla employee, trying to solve a specific technical problem but not necessarily having thought through all the implications of the proposed solution, suggested the "privacyunwise" option on a public mailing list that Mozilla uses for discussing decisions like this. It's a public list because that's how Mozilla prefers to operate.
In the 24 hours that follow, there are 5 responses asking for a clearer description of the problem being solved and why this specific "unwise" option is considered the best solution. Three of those responses are from Mozilla employees. Following this, the author of the original proposal says that clearly more work is needed in terms of solving the particular problem they are facing.
A few days later, there were three more mails objecting to the proposal; two from employees, one from a non-employee.
A few days after that, the original proposal author came back with what you call the "privacywise" option.
So:
1) The "privacyunwise" option was not _chosen_. It was _proposed_, on a list specifically designed to evaluate the sanity of such proposals. This list happens to be public, which is why you know that the option was considered at all before being discarded as not compatible with Mozilla's principles.
2) The "uproar" was largely, but not entirely, by Mozilla staff.
The "Bad Mozilla" conclusion can only be based on a misunderstanding of what happened here...
Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, I saw this thread; I did not reply to it because other people got there first and I would just be repeating what they said, but had they not replied I most certainly would have.
So Mozilla are claiming that has a negative effect on their sending reputation.
If that's true - it's a problem with the companies we've collectively chosen to outsource email reputation to - not with people who want to receive plain text email.
It becomes a problem when you pump lots of email into a good sized provider, and your open rates are poor. Google knows more about what mail you read than you do.
Google knows, for example, that I get the Vagrant-DigitalOcean mailing list mail, and open it maybe a handful of times a year. If they are downgrading that mailing list's reputation based on that they're 100% wrongly reading my intentions into their data. That's Google's fault (even if they're externalising the costs ont ot he mailing list).
