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 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.