Tracking
What became of the mail this mailbox sent.
Tracking tools
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| getEmailTracking | Whether one message was opened, by whom, how often, and which links were followed. Takes a thread id, an RFC Message-ID or a tracking id. |
| getFileDownloads | The files sent as download links on a thread: filename, size, how many times each was downloaded, when the last download was, and whether the link is still live. Takes a thread id. |
| listTrackedEmails | Messages sent with tracking on, newest first, filtered by whether they were opened or clicked. |
| getEngagementStats | Open and click rates over a window, with the top links, the clients, and how many fetches were filtered out. |
These see only mail sent with tracking on, which is on unless it was turned off for the address the mail was sent from or for All addresses. getEmailTracking says "nothing tracked for that message" rather than reporting zero opens. The phrases "nobody opened it" and "we were not recording" are different answers, and a tool that gives the first for the second lies about the recipient.
getFileDownloads counts people, not scanners or link previewers, and it never names who downloaded a file, because a download link is one URL for every recipient of the message. Files attached inside a message are not listed, since nothing is recorded when those are opened, so an empty answer means "no download links on this thread" and not "nobody opened the attachment".
Every rate is over TRACKED messages, never over all sent mail. A mailbox that tracks one message in ten has an open rate for those ten; dividing by everything it ever sent produces a number that falls each time somebody sends an untracked reply, which is not a fact about how their mail is read.
The counts leave out scanners and privacy proxies, and each report states how many were excluded. Opens seen through Gmail’s image proxy do count, because a person displayed the message, but the proxy caches, so a count through Gmail is a floor rather than a total.