What is opencounter and why is my client trying to use it in a bulk email?

Question

My company send a LOT of bulk email for clients. And yes, we follow all the best practice protocols to ensure we're not spammers. The system is proprietary, based on open source code. Customers have a GUI to enter content, similar to the big guys like MailChimp and the like.

A staff member brought a UI challenge with the GUI to me, using a client's bulk email as an example. I dug into the source to see if they had some exotic CSS that might be affecting my interface, when I noticed the following tag:

<custom name="opencounter" type="tracking"> </custom>

My interface certainly doesn't insert that code into an email. So I ran a Google search....4 results, no explanation what it is. So, what is opencounter? Who's technology is it? Does it have a valid reason for being used on our (proprietary) email system?

Answer 1

My best guess is that it is something that is auto-substituted to put in some tracking information into the individual e-mails. I'd suggest doing some tests on "bulk" e-mails you've set up just to yourself. Put some known content immediately either side of it and then send yourself this e-mail and view the source to see if its been substituted with anything. e.g.

XXX<custom name="opencounter" type="tracking"> </custom>YYY

If the final output has XXXYYY or something then you'll know its a tracker in the bulk e-mailer. If it outputs as is you can probably safely assume you can get rid of it. If it gets rid of it completely then it may be used for some kind of processing on the server but I'm not sure what that might be...

The other thing you can do is to do a search of your entire codebase for "opencounter" to see if there are any references to it.

One final thought: Does your customer interface allow them to put in HTML directly or is it just a gui? It occurs to me that if they used a previous bulk e-mailer then it might be something specific to that one that got copied over if its not in yours.

Answer 2

It appears that "opencounter" is a proprietary counting mechanism used by Exact Target's bulk mailing system. Apparently, the client was copy/pasting from an old campaign done on ExactTarget to move the design to our system. It is therefore safe for me to remove.