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

We found some code being inserted into emails sent by our proprietary email system and have no idea of its provenance.

My company sends a lot of bulk email for clients. (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开发者_StackOverflow社区 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.

What is opencounter? Who's technology is it? Does it have a valid reason for being used on our (proprietary) email system?

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.

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.

We had a similar situation and traced it back to a user who was utilizing a third-party WYSIWYG tool to develop code that they then pasted into our CMS. It's a harmless issue, but it points to the need to improve our tool so that others don't feel like they have to use another editor.