Email Trackers Are Watching Your Inbox. Here’s How To Block Them.

Email trackers are everywhere

Email tracking is a basic but effective surveillance tool that has taken over most inboxes.It usually uses a tiny pixel image attached to an email that you can’t see, but as soon as you open the email, the image is loaded from the server, which records that data for the tracking organization.The accuracy of these trackers varies.Some are similar to read receipts and tell you when and how often an email was read, while other trackers track the number of clicks and downloads or let the sender know when and where an email was opened.

A 2018 study by Princeton University showed that computer scientists estimate that 70% of email lists are using tracking tools.Marketers and salespeople also make extensive use of email trackers to schedule follow-up messages, but many more are using something other than these tools.

Acknowledging that you have received your message is useful in the workplace.According to a 2017 report by One More Company, an “email intelligence” startup, 16 percent of conversational emails are tracked.

One example of this is detailed in a BuzzFeed feature article about Jay-Z fan David Johnson, who sent the rapper more than 200 emails, which have been tracked through the ReadNotify company for years, in which Johnson detailed his life to Jay-Z, but never received a response.but never received a response.”Jay-Z opened every one of my e-mails and would even reopen them to reread them,” Johnson said.”He clicks on links and opens emails for up to 20 minutes.”

This information eventually becomes a source of frustration and one wonders if it is even worth it.

How to know who’s following you with an email tracker

To spot email trackers in my inbox, I use Ugly Email, a Gmail extension that blocks trackers and displays an eye in the subject line of tracked emails.For me, that open eye revealed how many people were trying to view my inbox activity.

PixelBlock is another Gmail extension; it blocks email trackers and tells you how many times the sender has tried to track it.

Unfortunately, these extensions are limited to Gmail; however, in Outlook and Thunderbird, not loading images (including pixel trackers) is the default method of viewing emails, so if the user does not change this setting, the tracking program will be limited.

A 2015 technology survey by the Pew Research Center revealed that nearly three-quarters of Americans said it was “very important” for them to “control who has access to their information.”Email trackers can take the initiative away from coworkers, marketers, and scammers you don’t know by informing them of your whereabouts and habits.And your privacy is easily compromised: the Princeton Report found that 30% of mailing lists leak recipients’ email addresses to third-party trackers.When you use an email tracker, you make the recipient adhere to any privacy policies and practices held by that company.

However, the feeling of being under constant surveillance doesn’t make us feel good.Studies have shown that electronic surveillance at work leads to greater stress.

How to block email trackers

If you don’t want to be attacked by email trackers, you should know that there is no foolproof method since email clients are constantly changing and evolving.

One trick, however, is to disable the image auto-loading feature in emails, as the image may contain any tracking pixels that are not visible.Turning off remote images will prevent read receipts from appearing in 90% of such cases.

• On the iPhone, you can go to Settings, click Mail, and then swipe left to turn off the option to Load Remote Images.
• On Android devices, select “Ask before displaying” when clicking on an image.

As mentioned earlier, Outlook and Thunderbird are set to disable loading images by default, so the above step is not required.

But all email users can go a step further and disable HTML in their inboxes, as suggested by the Electronic Freedom Frontier.

Almost all privacy breaches in email come from different email clients that essentially implement HTML in different ways. if you turn it off completely, you’ve pretty much avoided any potential data leaks.HTML is the web language read by email trackers to inform external servers about your email interactions.You may lose the ability to use GIFs and view fonts, but it makes your email more secure.

Is knowledge really power?

Walker-Morris sees the use of email tracking as a reflection of the greater uncertainty freelancers face.”I think our industry is shifting toward freelancing.I think if we start working out payment issues and getting back to clients in a reasonable amount of time, the need for this type of stuff will decrease a little bit.”

Freelancers may not have a company contact who is open and honest with them, and email tracking provides an independent form of transparency.Making sure your content is read and seen is a way to understand what’s going on.

It is recommended that you interpret the information from the tracker as an indication rather than an esoteric science.You have to find your own way of interpreting it.It’s not an exact science.You can’t get too obsessed with it.Don’t take it for granted.Do not make generalized statements.

But there are privacy issues, and recipients don’t know that I’ve involved them.I worry that I’ll learn about other people’s email habits when they haven’t explicitly opted in.Unlike a typical read receipt, the email tracker I use does not let either party know that the email is being tracked.If you want to continue to use an email tracker, it’s an ethical decision to inform recipients of tracking expectations — a decision I have not made.