Spamhaus has listed bit.ly on the Domain Blocklist (DBL) for allowing spammers to abuse their redirector service.
Thus, if you use a bit.ly URL in your email, that message is much more likely to be labeled as "spam" by recipient filters. In fact, you should avoid using ANY URL shorteners in email, since these blocks come and go as the services get abused by spammers.
Here is a good article about using URL shorteners.
Open-rate tracking isn't foolproof, but it can nevertheless provide useful information for newsletter authors who are aware of the limitations. We have added an easy-to-use open-rate tracking feature to our CCtoMany newsletter service. See http://www.cctomany.com/Info/Metrics for more information.
Here's a great way to send a quick confidential note to someone, for example, if you want to share a password or credit card number safely.
Go to
www.burnnote.com in your web browser. Type the message, then press the Send button. You'll be given a unique URL to your message, which you can now email or IM or text to the recipient. When they click on that URL, they get to read the message you entered.
So now you're probably wondering what makes Burn Note any more secure than traditional email. Well, email is inherently insecure because it's transmitted in plain-text. Next, the unique burnnote.com URL will only work ONE TIME, after which the note gets deleted from their system. And if the recipient leaves their browser window open with the note visible, it'll self-destruct after 3 minutes. Re-visiting the unique URL won't bring it back. You can even employ options to prevent the recipient from doing a screen capture if you wish.
So long as you give a little thought beforehand, there's no risk of anyone at the Burn Note web site finding out your secret either. Add a password to your note, and it will be used to encrypt the message so that it is unreadable even on the BurnNote servers.
If you are a customer of our CCtoMany newsletter service and you prepare new messages using our online HTML editor, this new feature applies to you. You can now review previous messages which you have sent and use any one of them as the template (starting point) of a new newsletter.
See http://www.cctomany.com/Info/June2012 for more information.
