SPARK EMAIL FOR GMAIL HOW TO

Prefetching does not occur with other mail clients. Gmail Prefetch Detailed AnalysisĪs detailed above, Gmail prefetching only occurs in a limited set of circumstances. We have been able to confirm that this string is unique to Google’s Prefetch Bot. For each open event, you will want to ignore (or uniquely tag) any open event that matches the following user agent string: Stay tuned for future updates regarding the Report UI enhancements.įor others, detecting Gmail prefetch opens is still relatively straightforward. We are also actively working to add the ability to distinguish prefetched and proxy opens in our Analytics Report UI and Metrics API. We have already updated our events API and event webhooks to automatically identify these Gmail Prefetch events using the newly introduced is_prefetched flag.

SPARK EMAIL FOR GMAIL HOW TO

How to Detect and Ignore Gmail Prefetched Opensįor SparkPost senders, we have you covered. Because, the false opens are triggered based upon when users are using the Gmail application, your specific audience’s behavior and use-cases are the primary factors in how much you will be impacted by this anomaly. Your specific false open rate may be significantly higher or lower than what we are reporting above. For example: If you currently have an overall open rate of 20% at Gmail, your correct open rate would be closer to 18%. What this means is your open rate may be inflated by up to 2 percentage points. In looking at over 9.8B Gmail recipient open events in December 2021, for most senders, we saw that false opens accounted for between 1-6% of open events. What are the implications of the false opens at Gmail? Thankfully, they are minor and nowhere near the Apple Mail Privacy Protection scale. These open events are independent and distinct from user-initiated open events triggered by Google Image Cache. In investigating billions of open events, we can confidently say that these opens are false opens and do not indicate an actual user open event. The image prefetch only occurs when the user is logged into the Gmail application, comes from a Google IP address, and is requested using the following user-agent string:

This image prefetch is in addition to (and different from) Google Image Cache opens, which occurs when the user opens the email.

Gmail prefetches all images immediately before the UI displays the email.

An email is sent to the Gmail recipient while their session is active/open.A Gmail recipient is logged into and has an active session open to the Gmail app (either web or mobile app).The Gmail prefetch opens occur in the following circumstances: The recent changes with Apple Mail Privacy Protection had us wondering – where else is prefetching happening? While false opens come as no huge surprise, we have additional details around the limited set of circumstances in which Gmail is prefetching images in emails sent to Gmail users. Gmail is Prefetching Images, Leading to Marginally Inflated Opens

Spark email for gmail