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Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#141

Post by 867-5309 »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #140
relix wrote: post #50

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…

Redirecting through your own domain sounds like a good solution - not sure how I would do that with my Netlify/Nuxt based site though.

you'd have to control the domain DNS MX records. most registrars allow this unless you have an email package attached. i doubt these template sites allow for such control if your site is just a subdomain of theirs

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#142

Post by gspr »

jack_riminton wrote: post #115
jack_riminton wrote: post #36

Hey.com is a good solution for automatically stopping emails that do this

Lol at the downvotes. I don't work for them!

If I were to guess, the downvotes stem from the suggestion that changing one's email provider to a specific other one is supposed to be a reasonable way to combat tracking pixels.

It's kinda like suggesting moving to fix a leaky pipe.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#143

Post by gspr »

eric4smith wrote: post #40

For legitimate email marketers these pixels are important to have because: 1. Helps to prune users who never open emails thus giving you a smaller more engaged list. 2. Helps to see if the content they are sending to users is leading to engagement so they can send better emails next time. Yes, yes I know. Why even send emails in the first place. All email marketing is not evil. But legitimate marketers have businesse…

All of that is irrelevant. Someone wants to send me a message. That message may or may not be legitimate. There is nothing in the contract of messaging someone by email that says that I have to reply in any way, be it with an answer or with tracking information. There is in particular nothing that says that my email-reading software should go behind my back and send information back to the sender of the message. If it did that, I'd be furious.

What you are suggesting does not fit in the medium of email, independent of the legitimacy or intentions of the sender.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#144

Post by teraku »

relix wrote: post #50

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…

> 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.

I'm always looking for the super hidden unsubscribe button. I don't move to spam. But sometimes I get mails without even subscribing, and that is far worse.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#145

Post by im3w1l »

encom wrote: post #111
Griffinsauce wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's figurative? The point is that they're pretending to be something they're not.

That would be larping. Not cosplaying. I disavow both.

And to elaborate on this

Larp = live action role playing. Where you act as your character, as opposed to table-top role playing, where you say what your character does.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#146

Post by relix »

teraku wrote: post #144
relix wrote: post #50

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…

> 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. I'm always looking for the super hidden unsubscribe button. I don't move to spam. But sometimes I get mails without even subscribing, and that is far worse.

I totally agree! I completely understand why one would start pressing spam instead of unsubscribe, for this reason.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#147

Post by codethief »

_x5md wrote: post #108

For anyone using pixels: Under the GPDR tracking pixels require explicit consent as they monitor user behaviour. This _cannot_ be covered with any implicit forms of consent like 'you subscribed to the newsletter'.

I wish we'd have lawers sending out cease-and-desist letters to companies that use tracking pixels – just like back in the 2000s there were thousands of lawers that sent us letters when we used KaZaA…

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#148

Post by kureikain »

relix wrote: post #50

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 can confirm this.

I was frustrated at some points when I was on my early day with my news letter and AWS SES. I don't know why people spend time to register for my news letter, after reading through the archive. Yet, they chooese to mark email as spam even though we explicitly have an unsubscribe link and require double opt-in.

For AWS SES, you have to maintain spam rate at So yeah, it's really important to manually unsubscribe people that won't read email. Don't even attempt to make a final email to ask them if they want to be remove because you risks another "mark as spam" click.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#149

Post by grey_earthling »

bennyelv wrote: post #35
pfundstein wrote: post #4

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.

Not only that, but the way the article came about seems to be a bit strange. Apparently the BBC asked Hey to some analysis on their emails, and have written what appears to be a publicity piece for them on the result. Did you know that Hey allows you to block tracking pixels for the low price of $99/year? Now you do! Not the kind of thing I'd expect to see from the publicly funded BBC.

The BBC has form on this. They periodically publish news articles reporting that a person's life was saved by the app What3Words, without mentioning the existence of similar proprietary and open systems.

See for example:

=> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-55... 2021-02-03 What3words: Stafford women rescued from flooded river after using app

=> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49754820 2019-09-20 What3words: 'Life-saving app' divides opinion

=> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-49319760 2019-08-15 What3words: The app that can save your life

(Yes, that's the headline they used.)

=> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47705912 2019-03-26 Three-unique-words 'map' used to rescue mother and child

=> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40935774 2017-08-30 TEDGlobal: Three words that give people an address

=> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32444811 2015-04-29 Giving everyone in the world an address

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#150

Post by rcxdude »

Nextgrid wrote: post #82
achairapart wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also because of this, if you're blocking tracking pixels in a privacy conscious way you often get removed from the mailing list without any notice, which is very frustrating. Or you get one of those mail saying "We are removing you from the list because you don't read our newsletter", often without offering any other confirmation signal. Basically they says "Let us track you or you are out of this list". And this…

> you often get removed from the mailing list without any notice Seems like nothing of value would be lost? > They don't actually care if you read or enjoy their content, you are either one of the users who increase their opening and click rates, or you're a useless burden to them. Confirms that indeed nothing of value would be lost. It seems like a win-win situation, spam-letters you wouldn't want to read anyway eve…

>Seems like nothing of value would be lost?

A lot of value could be lost. There are one or two newsletters I get by email which I read frequently and may contain extremely valuable information (i.e. could result in a significant sale). It could easily be a pretty significant loss to the company (and me) if they stopped sending them.

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