As of July 12, 2021, this "Learn Veracross" site has been deprecated. It will remain live through December 2022, but will no longer be updated. All knowledge content has moved to the new Veracross Community. Please update your bookmarks.
Overview
Open tracking is feature in the Veracross mail server which tracks whether an individual recipient has opened a particular email that was delivered via a Veracross distribution list.
The delivery status of each email is always tracked (see more about delivery statuses). However, some schools may wish to track which of their delivered emails were opened by recipients.
How it Works
There are several important things to be aware of before enabling open tracking.
First, open tracking works by embedding a safe, invisible, 1 pixel image in every email. This means that depending on their email settings, recipients may get a warning message about displaying images in their email even if it does not look like there is an image in the message. For example, in Gmail, the warning message would appear like this:
If recipients choose to always display images from @veracross.com emails, they may not see this warning message.
Second, because the recipient may not allow images to be displayed, open tracking is not 100% reliable. The mail server is only able to tell which recipients have opened the email if the 1 pixel image that is embedded in the message is displayed. If the recipient does not ever choose to display images in the email, it does not appear that the recipient opened the email. In reality, the recipient may have read the email, but chosen not to display images in the message.
Lastly, when open tracking is enabled, it is enabled for every distribution list email that is sent out. This includes internal communication as well.
Tracking Opened Responses
If your school opts to enable open tracking, there are three places to see open status information.
Opened Percentage
On the Email detail screen in Veracross, you can see the percentage of emails that were opened. The detail screen can be accessed from the “Email Log” query on the System or Communication homepage by clicking on the Subject of the email that was sent. The “Opened” field will show what percentage of emails have been opened so far and will continue to update as more recipients open the email.
Please note: If open tracking is not enabled (or was not enabled when the email was sent), the “Opened” field will say 0%. Again, as mentioned above, this percentage may not be completely accurate depending on user image settings.
Individual Recipients
On the Individual Recipients tab of the email, you can see which recipients have opened the email if open tracking is enabled. The Status field will be “Delivered” and then will change to “Opened” once the recipient has opened the email.
Recipient Open History
If you would like to see the email history for an individual recipient, click the Communication tab on their person record to see how many of their prior emails have been opened.
Again, email tracking is only available for communication sent through a Veracross distribution list, so individual email communications that might appear here may not have relevant open tracking information.