Are You Being Tracked?
Email tracking—it’s something that all of us fall victim to. But what is it exactly? Email tracking is essentially a method of monitoring email delivery to the intended recipient. Likewise, an email tracker is a service that automatically notifies the sender that an e-mail message has been interacted with. Businesses typically use such trackers to monitor marketing emails that have been sent to their customers. Did the recipient receive the email? Did the recipient click on the email’s links? Did the recipient open the email’s attachments? These are all questions businesses can have answered with the help of email tracking platforms such as Streak, MailChimp, and Bananatag. Thus, I would not be surprised if a majority of the promotional emails currently sitting in your inbox are being tracked, simply because it is so easy to do so. Quite scary.
Tracking the Tracker
Now, what if I asked you to browse through your inbox, and identify which of your e-mails are being tracked by its senders? Sounds difficult, right? Not exactly. Thanks to some creative thinking and ingenuity, there are various e-mail extensions that you can now install in order to receive notifications about marketing emails that track you. For the purpose of testing, I decided to install Ugly Email, a Gmail extension that allows you to see if the email is being tracked before opening it.
Ugly Email & My Experience
Ugly Email safely sniffs through the emails in your inbox and exposes the emails that are being tracked. Every tracked email is marked with the “evil eye” so you can easily identify them. So far, Ugly Email is able to detect tracking pixels from the following platforms: Streak, Yesware, Mandrill, MailChimp, Postmark, TinyLetter, Sidekick, MixMax, and Bananatag. So how effective is Ugly Email? Well, let’s take a look at my inbox and find out.
Before installing Ugly Email, my inbox looked like this:
As you can see, none of my emails are marked, so it is extremely difficult to identify which of them are being tracked. It is quite an uneasy feeling knowing that my emails may be monitored without my knowledge.
After installing Ugly Email, my inbox looked like this:
Unlike my inbox prior to the installation of Ugly Email, there are now markers, or “evil eyes,” on a few of my emails, which indicate that those particular emails are being tracked. Ugly Email then takes it one step further by identifying what tracking platform the sender of those emails are using. For instance, when I hover above the evil eye corresponding to the “Top 200 Program” email, Ugly Email is able to identify that the tracking platform used is Mailgun. Similarily, when I hover above the evil eyes corresponding to both of Hrasvi’s emails, Ugly Email identifies that the tracking platform used is Streak. Very insightful and interesting.
Overall, I find Ugly Email to be quite effective at identifying tracked emails. Thanks to this extension, I now have better awareness with regards to promotional emails being sent to me, and can more effectively identify which emails to view or leave unopened. So go right on ahead and install it — it definitely has my recommendation.
