Odd Read By Time Stamps

It has been brought to my attention that there is an odd date and time read by time stamp on a ticket by 2 people we KNOW are off. We checked the sign in logs and there was no sign ins made by these people either.  Can send a screen shot if helpful.

Any thoughts on how this might have occurred?

Tags read-by time-stamp
Asked by Mathew Chandler on Thu 12/15/22 4:16 PM
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Answers (2)

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Brittany Renn Thu 12/15/22 4:24 PM

Hi Matthew, 

A couple of things: Is it possible that those users are reading the tickets via their email notifications? It would also show in the Read By history if the users read the ticket through their email when they get the notification. In addition, some email servers/clients will automatically load all remote content in an email when it is delivered.  So right when some users are notified, the "tracking pixel" in the email will get loaded, thus marking the ticket as read.  If desired, the tracking pixel can be disabled in TDAdmin, under "Notification Footers" section within the ticketing application.

Let me know if you have further questions about this! 

 

Best,

Brittany Renn

TDX Support

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I finally had a chance to talk one on one with the person reporting this, and it not adding up to them.
He is seeing Read By Dates at times that it does not makes sense (Read By Entry for someone who was off and confirmed that they had not checked their email). - Mathew Chandler Mon 2/27/23 3:22 PM
Mathew Chandler Mon 2/27/23 3:22 PM Last edited Mon 2/27/23 3:22 PM

Attaching images of what he is seeing.

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Thanks, Matthew! Were there any comments or updates made on those tickets at the times that user show to have read it at the same time? So for the first screenshot, was there any update or anything on the ticket at 3:52 PM? - Brittany Renn Tue 2/28/23 10:29 AM
confirmed - No there we no updates from these people. - Mathew Chandler Wed 3/8/23 11:19 AM
They don't happen to have any mail rules in their mailbox that would have automatically marked the message as "read" do they? It sounds maybe like that's a "no", but for sanity I wanted to check. - Mark Sayers Wed 3/8/23 11:28 AM
As best as we can tell, this likely has to do with the way your email server is rendering the read-by tracking pixel for your TDX notifications. Something about the way it renders that is causing it to trigger as read as far as the pixel is concerned.

Essentially there are roughly 3 options to address it:
1. Turn off tracking pixels for the Footer(s) of your ticketing app notifications and/or for the footer of your root level notifications of TDAdmin
2. Work with your email server's security team to not render HTML when receiving emails (the pixel is HTML reliant)
3. (admittedly less ideal) don't rely on the Read-by data for user visibility statistics/auditing. - Mark Sayers Wed 3/8/23 11:49 AM
Unfortunately we can't really address anything from within TDX to cause your mail servers not to render the HTML of the pixel upon receiving a notification, so if a change can't be made on the server's side of things, one of the other two options would be the next best step. - Mark Sayers Wed 3/8/23 11:50 AM
With regards to: They don't happen to have any mail rules in their mailbox that would have automatically marked the message as "read" do they? It sounds maybe like that's a "no", but for sanity I wanted to check.

Some do, but some don't. - Mathew Chandler Thu 3/9/23 1:51 PM
That could be doing it too, but mostly the post I sent about the email server rendering the tracking pixel is what probably is going on. - Mark Sayers Thu 3/9/23 2:18 PM
Mark, if we block images from loading in Outlook, will that prevent the HTML pixel from being downloaded/triggered? - Bobby Jones Mon 4/10/23 12:59 PM
I'm not honestly sure as it isn't a scenario we've ever tested. You'd have to give it a shot and see if that does the trick, but if you want that, then just disable the pixel in TDX as that seems like a faster fix to implement. - Mark Sayers Mon 4/10/23 1:43 PM