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Let's take inspiration from an article that appeared in the BBC 1 and that you also have it reported on our group Telegram (always very useful, thanks!). Let's talk about email tracking and how to avoid it. According to a company investigation Hey ( a provider that offers email to protect privacy ) each of their customers receives on average 24 emails a day trying to spy on him. The 10% receives as many as 50 per day.
What is meant by spying? Those of Hey they obviously use a strong term also for marketing reasons, however what they refer to is still very interesting. In fact, they mainly talk about the very famous tracking pixels! The tracking pixel is a tiny image, equal to 1×1 pixel (therefore, in fact, invisible to the naked eye) that allows companies to follow our behaviors.
One of the most famous is that of Facebook, but there are many companies that use it for marketing within their emails. Thanks to the tracking pixel, the company will be able to find out whether or not you have read the email, for example. You can also know where you were when you opened it, how much time you spent reading it, whether you read it on your mobile phone or on your computer 2.
Email tracking
All this is done without asking your permission, without asking for authorization and without it being said explicitly and clearly. You open an email and a spy pixel reveals a lot about your behavior to the company that sent it to you.
There are many brands that are mentioned in this research, they are all quite famous and you can see an absolutely non-exhaustive list of them here: Spies don't like us. Let's say not exhaustive because Hey refers mainly to British or US companies. So you won't see Italian companies appear even if we are pretty sure that it will happen with many of them too.
What he proposes Hey within its emails is interesting because it blocks tracking pixels and also warns you that it has done so.
What you can do, besides obviously using a Browsers sure as Brave or Firefox and its extensions, is not to enable the loading of images of received emails by default! In this way the tracking pixel, being an image as we have seen, will not be loaded automatically. Some providers, such as ProtonMail, have this option disabled automatically. Check your usual email program: our advice is to look in the settings and never upload images automatically. Do this only for the emails that interest you and only if absolutely necessary.
How not to upload images?
Almost all webmails allow you not to automatically upload images, some like ProtonMail And Tutanota they do this by default. Others, however, must be enabled in the settings. We don't do tutorials on this because every mailbox is different from each other, still go and look in the settings.
We add that recently ProtonMail has added an interesting innovation, namely the ability to automatically block emails tracers present in emails and above all it will allow you to upload images without being tracked 3.
If used Thunderbird instead you just need to disable the loading of images by going to Tools → Options and then selecting the table Privacy. From there check if the checkbox “allow remote content in messages” is enabled or not. Please also check out the support page Thunderbird if in doubt: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/remote-content-in-messages.
Is Hey worth using?
We already know Hey and for some time we have been evaluating whether to include it among the recommended providers also for features like this. Unfortunately, in our opinion its annual cost is really excessive (99$) even if offering 100GB of space it could be a good option for someone, also its application unfortunately it is not Open source and it actually contains a tracer by Google 4. What do you think about it? Some of you already use it Hey as a mail provider? We are waiting for you upstairs Telegram, Reddit or Matrix for the comments!
- Spy pixels in emails have become endemic[↩]
- Spies don't like us[↩]
- Enhanced tracking protection[↩]
- Hey on the Play Store[↩]
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