How to avoid false positives in email opens tracking

[#1]

I used several tracking tools - Readnotify and ContactMonkey are some of them.  One of the main problems with these applications is that whenever you refer to a tracked email you sent to a customer in the past  - open it to check something etc. - the trackers would register an open by the "recipient", i.e. you open an email you sent to a customer and tracker shows that it was opened by the customer.  Of course we can be checking IP addresses, locations etc but who has time for that?

A big advantage of Hubspot is that this issue was well taken care of in Outlook client - you may open your own messages in Outlook and this will not trigger a false positive opens.

However, when I send an email to a prospect from desktop and then a response comes that I open on my phone (this applies to all email clients, I use Bluemail now, but used many other apps in the past) Hubspot registers the opens as made by the customer.  Is there any way to solve this problem.  I can guess of course that it is me who opened the message, especially when I and the customer are in different countries - Hubspot shows the country where the email was opened.  But if I and my customer are in the same city how can I know for sure who opened the email?

Receiving a false notification is a bad thing in general.  We are trying to monitor customer's actions and we all the time impatiently wait when a customer opens my email with the commercial proposal and we all want to know how many times he opened it and all this stuff.  So, when a notification comes you get excited and then you see that it was you who opened the message .....

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ascar, you raise an important issue here. The way our email tracking works, when an email is opened the invisible tracking pixel is downloaded and thus triggers an open notification. On a desktop, HubSpot sales is able to recognize your cookies and/or the IP address of your computer, which prevents those self-open notifications. However, since mobile devices do not have a static IP address, it's not possible for HubSpot Sales to recognize that your mobile device is your own IP as opposed to that of your recipient. 

[#3 · Accepted solution]

I disabled automatic image loading in the mobile email client.  This is not a complete solution since I have to make an extra tap on the screen when I need to see the images, but I believe it is better than receiving false positives.

[#4]

HI @Ascar Thanks for sharing that solution! Even if it's not ideal, I'm sure other customers who are experiencing the same frustrations will be grateful for the potential work-around! 

[#5]

Hello,

 We take advantage of your free CRM service which allows us 200 notifications of tracked email per team member. We love the CRM  however the tracking sometimes becomes confusing and problematic.  Frequently someone will run out of notifications with the first week of the month which we find unlikely due to the low volume of emails sent. What we are noticing is that we will  receive repetitive pop-ups of the same email being opened within  seconds of the last. This can continue till it seems that the recipient has opened the specified email 60 to 100 something times within a 24 hour period. Could you please advise so we can best utilize your wonderful service..

 Thanks 

Tammara

[#6]

I'm having the same problem. I know that I can mute the notifications for that email that keeps being opened, however, I didn't find that out until I was already over my 200. Now there is no way to mute the email notifications. It's really annoying to be notified every 5 seconds that the email has been opened again.

I know the person to whom the email was sent, and I know she isn't repeatedly opening it. Perhaps she has her email client set to view snippets so every time her email client refreshes it is downloading the tracking pixel again?