What You Need to Know About Email Trackers and How to Stop Them
They’re monitoring you. You can tell by the pixels.
By David Nield
Your inbox is watching you. Yeah, most of us know we’re being tracked online, but you might be surprised at the number of incoming emails that can tell when, where, and how often they’ve been opened.
Sure, you can unsubscribe from newsletters and delete accounts with companies you feel are sending you too many digital missives, but if that’s not enough, you can pull the shutters down on data-gathering in your inbox, no matter what email account or client you use.
How email trackers work
Email tracking is typically triggered by some kind of interactive element in a message. When your email client loads that element — often just a single-pixel image that you won’t even see — it notifies the sender, and they assume the message has been opened.
This is known as pixel tracking, and it works the same way as read receipts in instant message conversations. It’s useful for all kinds of reasons. Marketers know they’ve targeted a working inbox, co-workers know you’ve seen their message, and campaigners know how many people they’ve reached, for example.
