Turn off link tracking in campaigns

[KittyS38]

I want to turn off the link tracking in my emails. Many of my subscribers can't open the linkds because their email provider sees them as a security risk--especially for Gmail addresses. If that's the case, this service is not useful for linking to events and information pages, which is why we are using it. How can I turn the tracking off?

[KittyS38]

For clarity, r20 links are used as intermediate URLs to accurately track what links are being clicked by your contacts so they can show correctly in your reporting. Other large email marketing providers use this same method with their own types of link tracking.

[steve811]

On our email broadcast yesterday, we have a link in the email we sent out.  We received reports that the link is broken, because you are replacing our link.  While knowing who opens an email is valuable, we don't need you to track clicks on our URL, as we have data on who visits our site.  This is serious, as we are losing prospects, who can walk away, figuring that we don't have our act together.  Tracking whether an email is opened is fine, but we need you to leave our link unchanged.

[EllenK58]

With the newest release, you took away the ability to turn off tracking clicks on weblinks. The tracking URL that pops up when I hover over URLs makes my email look like phishing. I would really like to turn the tracking off, as I had been able to do before this release.

[karljeffery]

Hi, a cybersecurity expert who receives our Constant Contact e-mails is telling us we should only include links to pages on our own web domain in e-mails, rather than have Constant Contact convert them to rs6.net so it can track the clicks.

He says that he teaches people never to click on 'suspicious links' in e-mails, which means any link to a domain other than the one of the company sending the e-mail. Also by including these links in our e-mail we are contributing to reducing organisational cyber resilience.

It may be a fair point - and considering we never look at click statistics anyway, maybe we should follow his advice, but I don't think Constant Contact offers the capability to not use redirect rs6.net links?

Karl jeffery, London 

[IntelligenceCommunityNews]

We also would like the ability to turn the tracking off, as we used to be able to do. Yesterday, one of our customers (in the cybersecurity industry) reached out to us to say that the rs6.net domain was blacklisted and flagged as malware. If customers aren't able to click the links on our emails because of tracking that we can't turn off, then the Constant Contact service is hurting our business rather than helping it.

Please look into the blacklisting issue and add the capability to disable tracking.

Thank you!

[ElectronicGoldmine]

I vote to remove link tracking. 

These CC links look so suspicious, see link below.

There is no consensus on what Spam is on email platforms and they all do their best to prevent it.

I'd rather have our emails go out without link tracking to prevent the possibility of it being detected as spam.

This link below came from our Campaign at CC. I'm looking at it and it looks suspicious!

CC Link - 355 Characters

https://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001kWCC4SrDNJX5r4XUFU9jZH18AcfM64JEWoc6kobBsjKP-JgtbBWUxAuTj22WlDj4VheX...

What it actually represents - 64 characters

https://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/prodinfo.asp?number=SAVE5

[Caitlin_M]

For clarity, r20 links are used as intermediate URLs to accurately track what links are being clicked by your contacts so they can show correctly in your reporting. Other large email marketing providers use this same method with their own types of link tracking.

[IntelligenceCommunityNews]

Thanks, Caitlin -- I do understand that. But yesterday, one of our clients emailed me to say that the r20 link on all of my e-newsletter articles was being blocked as blacklisted because of malware. Here is what he sent:

"r20[.]rs6[.]net" is currently on our blacklist and the last reported malware incident from that domain was today.
Source: https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/url/r20.rs6.net

So, as of yesterday, the r20.rs6.net domain was blacklisted by IBM's Xforce.  If we can't turn those links off, how can we protect ourselves against the damage to our site's reputation that occurs because of things like this? Could you please look into why the intermediate link's domain is being blacklisted?

Thank you for your help,

Loren Blinde

Editor, IC News

[Caitlin_M]

@IntelligenceCommunityNews  Thank you for bringing that up and I apologize for how I overlooked that. There can be a few reasons why this happens, especially with recipients who have higher security programs. Our support team is best suited to continue this conversation so they can work with you live on the line. I would recommend contacting the support team and if possible, having some information on hand to reduce the amount of time needed for troubleshooting. 

• The security program and the version number
• If the recipient is on a home or work network, wifi or data
• Are the links you're inserting into the email beginning with HTTP or HTTPS?
• Have they safelisted our URLs?

[karljeffery]

Hi Caitlin thanks - but I have been told that corporate cybersecurity experts are now advising people not to click on any e-mail link with a different domain to the sender's company. The only way people can follow the links in our e-mail in that case is if we can stop using redirect links at all.