BookBub can change ads on unopened emails?

[Sailor Stone]

This is interesting I think:
I received an email from BookBub for their Wednesday bargains at 10:15 this morning. I did not open it as I was working on my own BB ads for my books. After I finished and submitted my BB ad at exactly high noon I went back to my emails and opened the BB email and there at the bottom was my brand new ad which I had sent in just moments before.
I had no idea they could do this.

[LilyBLily]

That's spooky.

[Simon Haynes]

If it's webmail, then the page you see when you open the email is partly generated from their server. They don't email you the images, they're loaded from the server, and what happens when you click that image is dictated by them, not your email client.

[LilyBLily]

If it's webmail, then the page you see when you open the email is partly generated from their server. They don't email you the images, they're loaded from the server, and what happens when you click that image is dictated by them, not your email client.

Which explains why I see no images when my internet is down, even though I've supposedly downloaded the piece of email.

[Simon Haynes]

It's also how people track whether you're opening their mail. They not only know that the image is being loaded, they know WHO is loading it. Never open or preview spam emails...

I wrote an email app which displays everything in plain text. I've used it for 15 years or so, but a config change by my ISP when I moved houses stuffed up the downloading of email. I really must enable it again.

Then, of course, you start to get a flood of emails asking whether you still want to receive newsletters and the like, because they can't tell you're opening them...

[Eric Thomson]

It's also how people track whether you're opening their mail. They not only know that the image is being loaded, they know WHO is loading it. Never open or preview spam emails...

I wrote an email app which displays everything in plain text. I've used it for 15 years or so, but a config change by my ISP when I moved houses stuffed up the downloading of email. I really must enable it again.

Then, of course, you start to get a flood of emails asking whether you still want to receive newsletters and the like, because they can't tell you're opening them...

The Mozilla Thunderbird email client does essentially the same thing - prevents emails from displaying links or images unless you allow it.

[Simon Haynes]

Yep, but Mozilla didn't exist back then. I think I started work on mine in 2002, when MS Outlook (the basic client) kept crashing when composing replies. I got so angry losing my work I wrote my own email client, and then when Word did the same for my writing, I came up with yWriter.