121–130 of 341 posts
I can't think of any email clients that automatically download external images by default. The article seems to be over-blowing the issue a bit.
GMail displays them. It uses a proxy for downloading, but I don't think that matters unless they're preloading all images unconditionally upon server-side receipt of the message. Apple's macOS Mail.app client displays external images by default, as does their iOS app.
Anyone knows if pihole blocks those addresses?
Potentially, depending on your Pi-hole’s blocklists. For reference you could check against these popular spy pixel lists: https://github.com/apparition47/MailTrackerBlocker/blob/main... https://gist.github.com/dhh/360f4dc7ddbce786f8e82b97cdad9d20 https://gist.github.com/leggett/8c2ab9735037cb66c218fdbe898d...
The reason is pragmatic, by the way. HTML mails take longer to read, and I really don't need some crappy graphics or web design when scanning through my inbox.
If you're running a mail newsletter, this tracking is pretty important. You're supposed to stop sending emails to someone who's not interacting with them, or you get an extra point towards being flagged as spam. Since people are already weary of clicking the unsubscribe link and instead casually mark everything as spam, every little bit towards keeping your reputation counts. It's a damned if you do, damned if you do…
I'm not sure why people would be wary of clicking the unsubscribe link on something they explicitly subscribed to in the first place. I mean, they trusted you enough to give you their email address to subscribe in the first place, right? The only scenario I can think of is when people didn't intentionally subscribe or were coerced into subscribing and those newsletters can go to hell and fully deserve to be marked as…
It's worse because the next time you receive a post from a newsletter you unsubscribed from, which may be weeks after you unsubscribed, you may actually start doubting if you did unsubscribe from them. There's no way to know, and this seeds some doubt in your mind.
So the next time you want to unsubscribe from a newsletter, legit or not, you're just going to press the spam button because there's no downside to you as the reader, but there is the upside that your mail client will from now on keep out the newsletter posts no matter if the newsletter would actually have unsubscribed you or not. Basically the "mark as spam" button is a 100%-unsubscribe button, while the unsubscribe button is a 95%-unsubscribe button.
I don't believe the situation of malicious actors in newsletters is actually as bad as some HN comments make it appear. Most legit use double opt-in and have good unsubscribe policies. As usual it's the few bad ones that ruin it for everyone.
If you're running a mail newsletter, this tracking is pretty important. You're supposed to stop sending emails to someone who's not interacting with them, or you get an extra point towards being flagged as spam. Since people are already weary of clicking the unsubscribe link and instead casually mark everything as spam, every little bit towards keeping your reputation counts. It's a damned if you do, damned if you do…
Can you please elaborate on this? Do you mean people intentionally avoid this because it leads to the advertisers marking that as "read" and therefore a live user?
Asking because I recently purged my old emails which had thousands of emails, they obviously never stopped sending even with zero interaction.
But my method was to click the unsubscribe link which I was afraid might give them more information about them and doing the opposite of what I wanted. I know some didn't even respect the unsubscribe, I took note of which ones I explicitly clicked and they're still sending spam to me.
If you're running a mail newsletter, this tracking is pretty important. You're supposed to stop sending emails to someone who's not interacting with them, or you get an extra point towards being flagged as spam. Since people are already weary of clicking the unsubscribe link and instead casually mark everything as spam, every little bit towards keeping your reputation counts. It's a damned if you do, damned if you do…
It’s super annoying that other people’s spam habits hit you. For a while I couldn’t receive email notifications from Facebook because so many other gmail users marked them as spam, so no matter how many I unmarked, I was screaming in the wind. Fair enough that other people don’t wanna deal with that crap, but it should still be my prerogative to receive them. I first gave up, and later decided I didn’t care. But for…
I actually wrote about the issue the industry has with tracking on my blog a while ago, and have spoken on a panel and a podcast on the subject too.
There was some great discussion on the blog past when I posted it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21024926
If you're running a mail newsletter, this tracking is pretty important. You're supposed to stop sending emails to someone who's not interacting with them, or you get an extra point towards being flagged as spam. Since people are already weary of clicking the unsubscribe link and instead casually mark everything as spam, every little bit towards keeping your reputation counts. It's a damned if you do, damned if you do…
Honestly, if people get what they want and a lot of tracking is stopped they'll probably find the quality of their internet experience reduced. There are lot of things companies do that privacy people dislike but is only there to improve user experience.
If you're running a mail newsletter, this tracking is pretty important. You're supposed to stop sending emails to someone who's not interacting with them, or you get an extra point towards being flagged as spam. Since people are already weary of clicking the unsubscribe link and instead casually mark everything as spam, every little bit towards keeping your reputation counts. It's a damned if you do, damned if you do…
It's a bit more complicated than that. There are many reasons why a pixel may not fire but the email is still read, and there are many ways pixels can record false positives.
Relying on email opens is really not a good measure of engagement.
Sadly, inbox placement is almost impossible to measure without email open tracking as feedback loops from gmail/hotmail/etc are just not good enough.
The same tracking functionality can be attached to logos in the email without raising any suspicion.
IIRC, Facebook were using audio tags at one point for email tracking.