How open rates are measured

[Abiertoware]

First and foremost congratulations on releasing Open EMM 2013, it has an extensive list of improvements over the 2012 version and things like the column ordering on the recipient list is fantastic.

My question is regarding something I noticed when looking at Opening Rates. It seems that if a recipient has a client like Thunderbird blocking images and content, Open EMM does not recognize this as an "open". If the user selects "display remote content from email@domain.com" then Openemm counts this as an "open". I noticed how ever that if the user reads the text of the mail and clicks on one of the links, the link is active, it is measured and recorded on Openemm redirect server, but it still has not registered as "open". So I can see how a lot of emails might be read, clicked on, but not counted as opened.

Can you think of a script, trick, or hack that would tell open emm:

If user clicks on any link
set status as "open"

Regards,

Mario

[maschoff]

You are right, mail openings and link clicks are recognized independently and if a link of a certain mailing is clicked by a recipient OpenEMM does not check if a mail opening was already registered in the DB for that user. I do not know of a workaround except changing class Rdir to add the described logic.

[Abiertoware]

Hi Martin,

Yes, there would definitely be a work around. Its just a case of knowing where to navigate to in the code I would just tell the system to :

Check first click (is this the first click)
If click is first, set OPEN=1
Else leave it alone

So all that would be changed would be this statement AFTER the (OPEN=1 if content loaded/email opened). If I knew where to place this code, I would because it would make sure that the OPEN is measured correctly.

Having said this, if you give me a rough idea of where to look I can do so. The only parts of Open EMM that I would not want to touch are the .java sources. There are lots of dependencies and just getting the tracer going is a challenge in it self If the changes suggested can be done without having to recompile .java files, let me know where and I will look at it.

Kind regards,

Mario

[maschoff]

As I wrote above the class to modify would be Rdir.java (which requires a recompile, of course).