My timer isn't showing the correct time in Gmail

Modified on Mon, 19 Feb 2018 at 02:16 PM

We have seen some reports of users who are on Gmail seeing stale timer images delivered from MotionMail.


Gmail has added some security features to their service in the last two years that may be causing some of the problems you are seeing. They have a server that downloads the images from links in emails, and stores them at Google. When you view an email from gmail.com or the Gmail mobile app, it downloads this "old" image instead of loading the timer new.


This unfortunately means that some gmail.com users will see an older countdown clock instead of loading a brand new one, as intended.


Here is an article from Litmus (a industry leading email testing service) about Gmail's image caching and how it affects all email marketing images (including MotionMail): https://litmus.com/blog/gmail-adds-image-caching-what-you-need-to-know


If this behavior appears to be affecting you or your users, please try testing to a non-gmail email account to confirm. If it also happens to other accounts, please contact MotionMail support for additional help.


One mitigation for this may be (it has worked in some testing, but may not always work):

  • If you can control the Motionmail URL in your email, you can add a random number or some other unique number per user at the end of the URL like "http://s.mmgo.io/t/GFf?rand=1123123" to make it so each user gets a new timer. It will still be cached for that user, but it won't be shared between users


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