Privacy implications of email tracking [pdf]

For those reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15354114 OSX mail client does not help.

What do you mean? I have blocked external content, is that not enough?

I simply stopped reading HTML emails and read everything in plain text. Works fine for most of the emails I receive, the ones that don't are almost always marketing emails anyway.

I do realise clicking tracking links still works but they are way more visible in plain text mode and it's not that hard to copy & paste the relevant part of the link.

Too bad most email clients have removed plain text rendering these days. I also haven't found a good mobile plain text email client yet.

MailMate has a really nice feature when you can read your mails in plain text by default and toggle the HTML version on a per mail basis with a shortcut.

Actually, the paper says it does. It doesn't display inline content, I think by default.

The paper goes on to say that then you don't get to look at those e-mails. Yes. That's OK.

It is a bit fun how some think they can track if I open emails from them or not. I have several times got email with something like "we see you are not reading the emails you get from us, so we will remove you from our list". I did read the emails using Thunderbird, so was only their tracking that didn't work.

But this is maybe what we get when most read emails in web apps from companies that want to track everything everyone do and think so they can show the adds that are least relevant