I have no idea (didn't find out from a quick browse through the site), but the first thing that came to mind was an image in the mail, pointing to a server that slowly trickles a response without ever finishing so it can measure how long the other end is listening.
I worked at an ESP (Email Service Provider) a few years back. It may not be anymore, but it was a crazy environment back then of everyone trying to compete.
The major issue with this is going to be scaling it, with large ESP's doing 50-100 million messages a day, and 20-30% of those being opened, that's a lot of processes. This solution will probably be effective, mostly because it's going to a much smaller segment.
That's a neat trick. After hearing about Mirapoint, I built a simple proof of concept that uses time-delayed redirects to gauge how long a user has attempted to load an image:
If the sender is ReturnPath certified, Hotmail and Yahoo! automatically load images. Those two providers account for a large portion of email on the internet, so there's definitely value in this product.
It's still bullshit. Most email clients don't display images by default. The notion that email reading behavior can be tracked with anything resembling reliability is a blatant lie.
Are images blocked on hotmail, yahoo, etc. too now? I've only used gmail for the past 5+ years.
Either way though, it wouldn't really produce a random sample, though maybe it would allow somewhat meaningful comparisons between separate email campaigns even if the absolute numbers aren't too meaningful.
If that's true, it's very dangerous. Imagine somebody finds an iphone image vulnerability, a virus based on it will spread across the whole world in a couple of hours.
I'll be grumpy and say I'm surprised of how fast it reached first position on HN. However, I have to agree that there's a huge difference between deleting an email and opening it :p Great idea, good luck with it.
If they "click out" and move onto another message, they'll probably never read your email again. So for the marketer it's the same as a delete (and likely is an actual delete).
If they click on a link inside the message, that shouldn't get counted as a delete.
Feel free to ping me with more questions - aarlo@mirapost.com. Always looking to chat with others in the email world :)
