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Immediate webhook notifications for read email messages

Sometimes, you might receive a message.opened tracking notification immediately after you send an email message, even if the recipient hasn't opened it yet.

Nylas detects that an email message has been read by embedding a single-pixel image file in the message HTML and tracking when that image is downloaded. Nylas tracks the initial download only.

The image might be downloaded before the recipient opens the email message in the following situations:

  • The CDN caches the image pixel across multiple proxies, which results in multiple reads.
  • Gmail caches all images in an email message as the server receives them, which returns a message.opened notification.

Solutions

You can use one of the following options to help you work around the issue:

  • Combine Message Open tracking with Link Clicked tracking to determine that email messages have been opened after recipients click an embedded link.

  • Remove recents objects with a timestamp value of less than one minute from the email message's sent_at time.

    "recents": [{
      "ip": "12.234.567.89",
      "link_index": 0,
      "id": 0,
      "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.75 Safari/537.36",
      "timestamp": 1602623980,
    }]

Resources

For more information about message tracking and the webhooks Nylas generates, see the following documentation: