Grabbing Metadata from the Email Opens
I have to admit when I'm wrong - it's just the only decent thing to do, in my opinion. And today, I was schooled by my boss's boss's boss at The Shop saying that we did, in fact, have the user-agent in the nginx logs for the user email open messages I was just finishing up on. I was sure we didn't, and when I showed him... well... I instantly apologized for my mistake - I was looking right past it. Totally my mistake.
The reason this all came up was that the messages have an app_version field, and typically, for the other user actions, this is the browser and version for the web, or the version of the Android or iOS app - something that lets us know a little bit more about the platform it's coming from. Sadly, without this user-agent, I was stuck looking at the URL of the nginx log, and that didn't have much of anything really useful.
With this, I was able to easily parse it - already had the functions for it - and then drop that in just like all the other messages. It was a very simple fix, but it had a profound effect on the data quality. Much nicer to know this. Much.