User Guide
Table of Contents
Hurl, HURL, or H URL, are all abbreviations for Hollow Link URL. These are all aliases for the image URL you insert into your emails, or elsewhere. "Tracking pixel URL" felt a bit verbose, and we could also add support for inserting other media, besides pixels, in the future.
- After you've sent an email with an inserted Hurl, try not to open it. This will ensure visit records aren't generated by you, raising false positives.
- When you first insert a Hurl into an email message, Gmail, and Protonmail will make a request to the image to make sure it exists. You will have to subtract these requests from your Hurl's total read counts.
Sending
Unfortunately, Outlook does not support inserting URL images to outgoing emails. This means you will have to use an email client that's connected to your Outlook account in order to send emails with an inserted URL image.
Tracking
On the plus side, any emails received by an Outlook account will ping our server every time the email is opened since Outlook does not cache URL media.
Sending
- Click on the
Insert linkicon
- Click
Insert
Tracking
Tracking Gmail recipients works well if they haven't disabled remote content from loading. Also, Gmail has a proxy, "via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy", that fetches images on behalf of recipients which means the tracking IP address you see will belong to Google (66.102.8.173), and not the recipient of the email.
Sending
- Click
New message - On the styling panel, click on the ellipsis
... - In the dropdown, choose
Insert image - Insert your Hurl and click
Save
Tracking
Tracking Protonmail activity is harder than with Outlook or Gmail. Protonmail doesn't load images by default - users must choose whether or not they want to load remote content. It also caches remote media so it doesn't have to make requests as often.