immediate false opens in Gmail?

S

ScrubsDev

New Member
So we just successfully sent our first campaign with mailwizz (woot!) as a test we went to a smaller list of 900 people, and I noticed almost instantly mailwizz reported 163 opens, and that all of them were gmail addresses, all with the exact same "user agent" in open reports. So I copy/pasted that user agent into google, and found a few different results, including this article discussing my exact same problem with "false gmail opens" https://www.gmass.co/blog/false-opens-in-gmail/
Here is the user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)
I was wondering if anyone else had experienced this? I still noticed other gmail user opening and clicking links hours later, so it didn't happen to all of my gmail users, only around half. As long as those that I get this response with are getting the email, I suppose it's not a big deal, I just wanted to figure out what this was before I send to a much larger list.
 
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I think google is picking the senders and will run tests on them, you happen to be one of the senders and google will open your emails to make sure they have working links, etc. This also means they'll trigger the opens pixel, which will be recorded as an open. I think this behavior will go away once you get a better reputation for google, so i think keep sending good emails and you should see this go away.
One solution would be to block the ips from google, mailwizz has a area where you can do this, but i don't know how healthy that is and whether that would affect your future open rates.
 
ScrubsDev said:
So we just successfully sent our first campaign with mailwizz (woot!) as a test we went to a smaller list of 900 people, and I noticed almost instantly mailwizz reported 163 opens, and that all of them were gmail addresses, all with the exact same "user agent" in open reports. So I copy/pasted that user agent into google, and found a few different results, including this article discussing my exact same problem with "false gmail opens" https://www.gmass.co/blog/false-opens-in-gmail/
Here is the user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)
I was wondering if anyone else had experienced this? I still noticed other gmail user opening and clicking links hours later, so it didn't happen to all of my gmail users, only around half. As long as those that I get this response with are getting the email, I suppose it's not a big deal, I just wanted to figure out what this was before I send to a much larger list.
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facing same issue since many days , well as i researched and discuss with many friends , it can be auto bots on server or reverse pings/request from spam filter.
better if you either block these IDs or block IP as @twisted1919 suggested.
 
You don't want to block Gmail's Google Image proxy because those can also be real opens. I've dived into this a bit and there's not much you can do. Gmail will eventually stop inflating your open rates after you have a more established reputation and sending pattern, but until then it's just something you have to work around.
 
Scott said:
You don't want to block Gmail's Google Image proxy because those can also be real opens. I've dived into this a bit and there's not much you can do. Gmail will eventually stop inflating your open rates after you have a more established reputation and sending pattern, but until then it's just something you have to work around.
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Do you have a reference for this information, @Scott ? I have not heard this before.
 
twisted1919 said:
I think google is picking the senders and will run tests on them, you happen to be one of the senders and google will open your emails to make sure they have working links, etc. This also means they'll trigger the opens pixel, which will be recorded as an open. I think this behavior will go away once you get a better reputation for google, so i think keep sending good emails and you should see this go away.
One solution would be to block the ips from google, mailwizz has a area where you can do this, but i don't know how healthy that is and whether that would affect your future open rates.
Click to expand...
You are correct on this, and we can send good emails all we want, its not going away unless we segment the list of inactive subscribers. Gmail want active subscribers. So trying to segment the list is impossible with this gmail proxy affecting mailwizz opens. It seems to me gmail is masking the real user whether they open or not. There must be some solution to exclude false opens from the stats.
 
Jason Thompson said:
You are correct on this, and we can send good emails all we want, its not going away unless we segment the list of inactive subscribers. Gmail want active subscribers. So trying to segment the list is impossible with this gmail proxy affecting mailwizz opens. It seems to me gmail is masking the real user whether they open or not. There must be some solution to exclude false opens from the stats.
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I have to agree with Jason. There's bound to be a solution. My main indication for completely skewed tracking are the device stats. 95% of emails are opened on Mozilla Desktop in Windows. C'mon. That's been like that for the last 4+ years now. Also, I have not seen any Gmail measuring improvement over time, I'm afraid.
 
nadworks said:
Also, I have not seen any Gmail measuring improvement over time, I'm afraid.
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There's a thread dedicated to this issue in particular, where we discuss possible options, etc.
As we wrote there, we will revise it as soon as possible because we also want to make sure we get this right, not like last time when our change blocked valid opens.
 
Here's what the clever peeps at LITMUS have to say on the issue. Maybe this helps the MW team:

Gmail opens reported in Email Analytics - Help - Litmus.com

Between November 2013–January 2014, Google rolled out a series of updates to the way Gmail loads images in email. These updates affect the way Email Analytics d
help.litmus.com help.litmus.com

Sounds like "individual level tracking" is the answer. However, correct me if I'm wrong, but I felt we're already doing that. No?
 
If I get google as "openers IP" does it mean that the opener is a bot all the time? Or can this IP also mean that one of my leads opened?
 
twisted1919 said:
Yes, we already do that, each tracking link for opens is unique per subscriber, so it's individual.
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Hi @twisted1919 I'm just chiming in here. I'm not very technical but have an idea what this means. If this is the case then why can mailwizz not register the user agent properly without showing the (Google Image Proxy) as the user agent? This issue is a critical problem for most people using self hosted email servers. Yesterday i tried to remove subscribers that did not open, yet there is still subscribers on my list that have not opened. This results in the server reputation becoming bad overtime and most of the time the server goes from inbox to spam all because of this issue. I believe mailwizz team have had long enough to fix this issue since its been going on for years now. I don't want to sound like i'm complaining but it's becoming frustrating for myself and my clients and many other mailwizz users. Can you be more transparent on this issue or give any updates on your solution to fix this issue?
 
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