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Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

jacquescorbytuech.com

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Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#121

Post by ti_ranger »

iamacyborg wrote: post #81
addicted wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s only people who are in the email marketing industry who think that they are the email industry. The email industry would comprise a lot more than just marketing. You have email providers. You have email clients. You have non commercial newsletters. You have evites. You have e-cards. You have emails related to ticketing and reservations. The email industry is far larger than email marketing, despite what the emai…

I don't think email marketers think they encompass the entirety of the email industry, I was writing that article from the perspective of being an email marketer proposing something to my peers, ie others in the industry.

The article title, "Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem", implies that.

Either you do think email marketing comprises the entire industry, or the article title (and HN submission) are (or give the impression of) clickbait.

At least it doesn't seem you are doing any direct tracking on the post though ...

(I used to work for an ISP with a pretty large email service, so it touches nerves that were exposed when our enemies, those companies who try and find ways to irritate our customers, think they are the only important parts of the actual email industry)

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#122

Post by martin_a »

buboard wrote: post #99
jakobegger wrote: post #16

I think the GDPR is a good opportunity to reflect how much tracking we really need. Tracking has become so ubiquitous, it's become the default to put Google Analytics on a site, to put a tracking pixel into every email, to personalize every link we send out... But so much of that tracking isn't really necessary. I've stopped tracking website visitors and stopped including tracking pixels in emails a few years ago, an…

GDPR wants 0 tracking. That's wrong too, the internet can't work that way, even governments can't work that way. EU wants advertising to go back to the popup / animated gifs & flash / interstitial era to maximize clickthroughs in the off-chance one of them is actually interested in your ads. That's regression

> GDPR wants 0 tracking. That's wrong too, the internet can't work that way, even governments can't work that way.

How did it work like that all the time? It can work perfectly without all the tracking. Tracking is just so omni-present that some people can not imagine a world without it.

> EU wants advertising to go back to the popup / animated gifs & flash / interstitial era to maximize clickthroughs in the off-chance one of them is actually interested in your ads. That's regression

Actually that would be a great regression! I'd soooo love to have static images delivered to me again, instead of some JS bullshit which is tracking me all over the web.

Let's just kill all the ad networks over night. It will be a great time and we have a second chance to make the internet a great place.

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#123

Post by TeMPOraL »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #100
TeMPOraL wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketers, spammers and scammers are the same thing - sources of unsolicited e-mail, engaging with whom is not good for you. Eliminating marketers from the trio means only that much less messages to worry about.

I guess I must not be important enough or something because I don't recall the last time I got any marketing emails without sharing my email with a marketing person. The only marketing outside of "Rewards" programs that I get is marketing from the one conference I go to every year, and I get plenty of free swag from them, then I unsubscribe.

Did you take a look at your Spam folder? On my primary address (one I used for almost two decades), 90% of my spam is unsolicited marketing communication. Quickly skimming it, roughly half of that 90% is from parties I may have interacted with in the past, the other half is from apparently legit companies that I haven't interacted with, that pulled my address from somewhere (possibly because I used it to register my business).

Outside of spam, I spent some time and unsubscribed from most of the pseudo-solicited communications I got (i.e. the kind of pre-GDPR bullshit where I register for some service and this automatically counts as consent to receive marketing communication). About solicited marketing messages I don't whine much (except that they exist), that's on me.

(I actually used this occasion to softly threaten one of the marketers from the top of my box with legal action, because they are clearly breaking Polish law - they tried the "this message is only request for consent to sent the actual message" trick, but executed it badly.)

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#124

Post by benjymo »

mobjack wrote: post #114
microcolonel wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'm just not that familiar with HTML email anymore in general, and when I do read it I generally do not have images regardless. I always assumed that disabling 1x1px images would be first on the list of mitigations against this technique. I was under the impression that email clients, in addition to an option to block images in general (usually on by default for an address or origin), generally prevented the…

You can't tell if an image is a 1x1 pixel until you load it from the server. At that point, the pixel has already done its job. Most email clients these days don't block images by default unless it ends up in the spam mailbox. They never embed images directly into emails either.

At least Thunderbird and Outlook on Mac block images by default and you can whitelist people from your address book.

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#125

Post by hailk »

srbby wrote: post #7
JonAtkinson wrote: post #2

Off-topic: I absolutely love the design choices made by the author of this site. It's the basic browser stylesheet with some nice refinements. A real triumph of minimalism and incredibly readable.

Font is too big.

Their normal paragraph is 24px. Which is huge compared to the average content you find on web. The title is 48px. I find it more legible than the average web content, yet it's a little jarring. Some 22px/40px worked very well for me. Still a good example of minimal design.

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#127

Post by nickjj »

jakobegger wrote: post #16

I think the GDPR is a good opportunity to reflect how much tracking we really need. Tracking has become so ubiquitous, it's become the default to put Google Analytics on a site, to put a tracking pixel into every email, to personalize every link we send out... But so much of that tracking isn't really necessary. I've stopped tracking website visitors and stopped including tracking pixels in emails a few years ago, an…

> But so much of that tracking isn't really necessary.

The problem with Google Analytics and tracking is it's hard to tell what the motive is for putting it onto your site from the visitor's POV.

Not everyone who uses GA is using it for evil purposes.

They use it because GA makes it easy to gain useful business metrics, such as 100 people visited this page, 30 people filled out the account form, 5 people completed the checkout. Now you have a way to measure how good or bad your checkout flow is working and implementing this took almost no work at all. Rigging up your own DB model and tracking this stuff locally is a huge burden (especially if you account for bot traffic).

GA is also really useful to track referring URLs (with UTMs) because if you use these links from Youtube videos or blog posts, suddenly you can see exactly which posts are doing well. And "doing well" isn't just being more profitable if you're selling something. It helps you know what to write about or make videos on because this is what people want.

At the very least it's also good for just answering "am I growing?" where you look at unique visitors on a monthly basis and hope to see your chart moving up per month.

I just see it as a pragmatic tool to help you measure things. It's unfortunate it can also be used in other more malicious ways.

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#128

Post by iamacyborg »

microcolonel wrote: post #112
iamacyborg wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the platform used to send the email, it's trivial to change that pixel to any other image, ie a brand logo in the template. On the whole, disabling images entirely is the only real defence against email tracking.

Or I guess the mail server could just always precache all images at the time of receipt. Then nothing new happens when the mail is read. I think somebody here is describing GMail's approach that way.

gmail's cache hides a users location but you can still tell when they've opened an email, and you can still get a ton of information if they click a tracked link within the email as well.

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#129

Post by DanBC »

buboard wrote: post #99
jakobegger wrote: post #16

I think the GDPR is a good opportunity to reflect how much tracking we really need. Tracking has become so ubiquitous, it's become the default to put Google Analytics on a site, to put a tracking pixel into every email, to personalize every link we send out... But so much of that tracking isn't really necessary. I've stopped tracking website visitors and stopped including tracking pixels in emails a few years ago, an…

GDPR wants 0 tracking. That's wrong too, the internet can't work that way, even governments can't work that way. EU wants advertising to go back to the popup / animated gifs & flash / interstitial era to maximize clickthroughs in the off-chance one of them is actually interested in your ads. That's regression

> GDPR wants 0 tracking

That's wrong.

You're allowed to track users. You just need a legal basis to do so.

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#130

Post by accatyyc »

microcolonel wrote: post #112
iamacyborg wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the platform used to send the email, it's trivial to change that pixel to any other image, ie a brand logo in the template. On the whole, disabling images entirely is the only real defence against email tracking.

Or I guess the mail server could just always precache all images at the time of receipt. Then nothing new happens when the mail is read. I think somebody here is describing GMail's approach that way.

Then email servers would have to download billions of images of which 99% the corresponding email won't even be opened
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