EmailKnow:How I stopped my own inbox from inflating my open rate — with a hash, not an IP
Small, annoying problem with a nice constraint-driven answer. When you send a tracked email and then open it yourself — to check it looks right — that fires my tracking pixel. Now your "someone read it!" stat is inflated by... you. Every honest tracker has to solve this, or the numbers lie. The obvious fix: record the opener's IP and ignore opens from the sender's IP. But storing recipients' IP…
A common issue arises when tracking emails and opening them yourself inflates the open rate. To combat this, EmailKnow implements a clever solution that avoids storing personal data. When sending a tracked email, the sender's IP address is hashed with a secret salt using SHA-256, and only the resulting hash is stored. This hash is then compared to the hash of the opener's IP address when the pixel fires.
If the hashes match, it indicates that the email was opened by the sender themselves, and it is excluded from the real-open count. If the hashes don't match, it suggests that the open was made by a third party. By only keeping the hash and not the actual IP address, EmailKnow ensures compliance with privacy regulations and maintains the privacy of its users.
This approach allows EmailKnow to accurately determine if an open was made by the sender without compromising user privacy.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
