ProtonMail does a great job with removing trackers in email
Tutanota does this too with default image blocking:
No to Spy Pixels
21–30 of 37 posts
Re: No to Spy Pixels
#22I'm a bit mixed for analytics and privacy matters.
On one side, I prefer consent, limiting the amount of analytics made on me and I don't like giving my behavior for free.
On the other side, I work in a Tech startup and we need to know what users are doing / thinking. It is so important to iterate and grow quickly.
So it is the kind of stuff where I would like it to disappear, but at the same time I am a bit digging my grave.
Re: No to Spy Pixels
#23Standard email marketing best practice is to use this to see if the recipient is opening emails. If the recipient doesn’t, the sender should auto unsubscribe the recipient. Blocking tracking pixels means that the “good” email marketers will keep emailing until a manual unsubscribe event happen.
Re: No to Spy Pixels
#24For web browsing, doesn't the PrivacyBadger extension block tracking pixels?
It's a cat and mouse game, it is much better to disable loading images once and for all or display the plain text version of the email.
Re: No to Spy Pixels
#25My knowledge might be outdated but back in 2014? Gmail decided to download and cache images embedded in an email. This meant that a tracking pixel was only downloaded once (before a user even opened an email) and every subsequent time the email was opened, the cached image was served from Gmail's servers, not the image origin server. This meant that tracking pixels became useless for Gmail (web based) users. I'm stil…
I thought I remembered that too. According to this article (https://www.newfangled.com/how-gmail-image-caching-is-affect...) they don't fetch the image until you open it (so only subsequent reads are affected).
Re: No to Spy Pixels
#26My knowledge might be outdated but back in 2014? Gmail decided to download and cache images embedded in an email. This meant that a tracking pixel was only downloaded once (before a user even opened an email) and every subsequent time the email was opened, the cached image was served from Gmail's servers, not the image origin server. This meant that tracking pixels became useless for Gmail (web based) users. I'm stil…
That happens for some emails but I've also seen Gmail emails that activated tracking pixels normally.
Are those users using the web interface and using a Mail app to read their Gmail emails?
Re: No to Spy Pixels
#27Standard email marketing best practice is to use this to see if the recipient is opening emails. If the recipient doesn’t, the sender should auto unsubscribe the recipient. Blocking tracking pixels means that the “good” email marketers will keep emailing until a manual unsubscribe event happen.
Which services automatically unsubscribe you after a period of unopened emails? I can't imagine a marketing department ever adopting that practice.
Re: No to Spy Pixels
#28I get why people do this. I used to use Freshbooks for my billing. They include tracking pixels in their emails, so I could see if a client had opened their invoice or not. If a client was late, I could adjust my behavior based on that tracking pixel (if they hadn't seen it, I would just send the invoice again vs. calling and trying to hound down a payment). That said, I don't like the idea of tracking pixels either.…
The Gmail image setting is all wrong, though — it also blocks inline images.
The correct solution is trivial if Google cared to implement it: never load remote content in emails. If Google did this, then people would stop including remote content. Problem solved.
Re: No to Spy Pixels
#29Standard email marketing best practice is to use this to see if the recipient is opening emails. If the recipient doesn’t, the sender should auto unsubscribe the recipient. Blocking tracking pixels means that the “good” email marketers will keep emailing until a manual unsubscribe event happen.
Which services automatically unsubscribe you after a period of unopened emails? I can't imagine a marketing department ever adopting that practice.
Here is an example: https://www.mailpoet.com/blog/stop-sending-emails-to-inactiv...
But there are lots of incentives here, for example in HubSpot you pay per “marketing contact” which are people to whom you can send emails. If I flag someone as not a marketing contact, it saves me money.
Re: No to Spy Pixels
#30I get why people do this. I used to use Freshbooks for my billing. They include tracking pixels in their emails, so I could see if a client had opened their invoice or not. If a client was late, I could adjust my behavior based on that tracking pixel (if they hadn't seen it, I would just send the invoice again vs. calling and trying to hound down a payment). That said, I don't like the idea of tracking pixels either.…
This is a valid use case, and it's a service you can get with snail mail, by sending it as "certified". Except for the fact that emails aren't particularly private, it seems reasonable that the same thing could exist for important emails. But if so, the fact that it's tracked should be as clearly exposed to the recipient as the certified snail mail envelope. Although that might not be possible to implement on top of email.