Friday, February 09, 2007

Should This Bother Me?

A local marketing organization sends regular email messages about events and news. I'm on the list (and I like getting them). But each time I open one of their messages, my email program tells me that the sender has requested a return receipt, and asks whether to send one.

It bugs me every time. The messages are HTML messages, so it should be pretty easy for them to get an open rate and track who's actually reading without the little "Hey, bud, we're watching" reminder.

When I was first on the list I always clicked "no" for the receipt. After a while I stopped getting the messages. I don't know for a fact that those two things are connected, but I suspect so. When I rejoined the list I clicked yes and there's been no interruption.

It annoys me. Am I being hypersensitive about it?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Actually, it says that they aren't up to date on email marketing. Sending a return receipt is unnecessary in up to date systems like Constant Contact or PHPList - they use cookies or gif trackers to let the sender know whether you've opened the link.

I've got a site that is marketed towards CIOs - we use a promocode in our marketing links to help us tell where the user has come from when he registers - but I notice easily half of the users (who are technical in nature) will strip the ?pc=23425 from the link before visiting. The truth is people hate being tracked.