Good riddance.<p>Anecdotal, but I noticed a definite change in the tone of sales emails I was getting after I turned off images in Gmail. When they could tell I was reading their garbage but not responding, there was a lot of "tell me why you aren't interested" and "just a fifteen-minute call, just fifteen minutes we swear" and "please just talk to me, why won't you talk to me?"<p>They saw I was opening the emails—at this point, if I see something bold, I tap it without thinking—so they thought they had a chance, and they were really obnoxious.<p>I finally switched off images. After they stopped being able to tell if I was seeing their stuff, they got a little less pushy; they couldn't be sure I'd gotten their first email, so they focused more on re-explaining their product than trying to guilt me into reacting to them.<p>(I'm a little more understanding of people who use these to determine how much dead weight their mailing list has. Especially if you're an indie creator, you don't want to be paying for the 20% of people who might not be reading your newsletter. I don't mind a "please let us know if you're reading our newsletter" email as long as they're not obnoxious about it.)
>For instance, sales people live and die in their email clients. One really useful feature for them is read tracking. You send an email to a prospect, that person quickly follows up saying they are not interested, but 3 months later, they reopen that same email, you get a live read notification, you instantly take your phone and follow up. You win.<p>[...]<p>>Now, if the love letter author inserted a pixel tracker, they can know every single time you did go back to that email, and read it again and again. Not cool.<p>How is the first example any less creepy than the second example?
I worked at a startup (full of awesome people!) that, among other things, helped stock analysts track who was opening their publications (emails).<p>It wasn't just about finding out when or where someone was opening it. It was about finding out who was <i>forwarding</i> these emails. Because there was a cost to be on this mailing list- if you're forwarding the contents, you're effectively pirating that information (I wave my hands a bit as I say this because there's a loooot of interpretation there and you are welcome to disagree).<p>So if you send out your latest post to 500 (paying) customers, you could see- how many people read it? How many people came back and read it again later? And most importantly, how many different IP addresses were loading that tracking pixel? Oh, the tracking says the content I sent to John was opened by 1000 different people? Okay, John is off the list now.<p>What made it better was that a lot of the content was graphical. So the 'tracking pixel' was the content itself. Short of downloading and forwarding the image, you couldn't share it without there being a record.<p>The company wasn't what I wanted to do so I moved on pretty quickly- but it still strikes me how neat it all was.<p>Edit later: Oh right, the other thing- you could tell what company the person who opened it was at by the IP Address, some of the time! "Hey, I didn't send it to anyone at <Company>, why the $%&* are they reading it?"
> You send an email to a prospect, that person quickly follows up saying they are not interested, but 3 months later, they reopen that same email, you get a live read notification, you instantly take your phone and follow up. You win.<p>This is awful and precisely the reason I set my mail clients to not open remote content by default since I started using email decades ago.<p>If this exact situation occurred to me as a prospect, I would likely never deal with that company again.
I recently got an email from a mailing list saying "goodbye" to me because I don't read their emails anymore.<p>Of course, the catch is, I open their emails several times a week: I just block remote images. I replied back to them to tell them I don't appreciate them trying to track whether or not I open my mail in my inbox, but to keep me on the list.<p>I could get upset and unsubscribe because I'm annoyed they're relying on tracking, though FWIW, my experience demonstrates their tracking <i>isn't working</i>. And hopefully, me directly communicating with them that their strategy is both ineffective and unappreciated may help nudge them away from this sort of behavior.
I had an incident with Capital One sending me a letter in the mail saying that I hadn't read any email correspondence and they thought my email address was invalid. I have display images disables in Gmail.
A long, long time ago, I had a boss who was nutso about this stuff. One day, he comes to me, and tell me to turn on read-receipts.<p>"Sure thing, boss." I let it work for a few days, then turn it off. Turn it back on before he comes to check why it isn't working.<p>"Gee, boss, I dunno. I don't even notice that, now." He goes away to 'think' about it. I keep it on for a few weeks. Then I turn it off, for the last time. I never heard from that PHB on that subject ever again.<p>Read receipts aren't something people ACTUALLY want. It's something they want to want. Or want you to want. Either way, nobody actually wants that unless you're trying to externalize your coping strategies onto those around you, which is maladaptive and very no bueno.
This is in the top 10% of marketing communications where you are breaking bad news but modelling integrity. A herald of an age where privacy is a feature, not a bug.
Setting Thunderbird to default to only loading plaintext has been great for discovering sites that use trackers. Sometimes I'll sign up for a weekly newsletter, read it, but the hidden tracking isn't loaded. Inevitably, I'll get an email a few months later with instructions for unsubscribing since their tracking isn't showing that I read any of the emails.
Didn't most email providers kill these off years ago? I thought they just cached the images as soon as the email arrived, and showed you the cached version each time you opened the message.
I use this on my invoicing app. I implemented it after years of the app's users telling me that some of their customers/clients would consistently deny getting their invoices. This required me to sift through my email server logs to see if it was successfully delivered and that's a pita that was costing me time and my app's users a lot of frustration.<p>The app also allows users to create estimates, proposals, receipts, etc. I don't implement tracking on any of those documents, only invoices. An invoice is a "legal instrument" and I consider the documenting of it being opened a tool my users can offer a court of law as evidence their invoice was successfully delivered and viewed by the recipient. A court can certainly reject it, but they may also accept it.<p>I see it as little different than paying the Post Office for "Tracking" something you've mailed with their services.
I've noticed several mailing lists send me "you're not reading our mail, we're going to unsubscribe you" messages because I don't allow my MUA to spy for them.<p>Fixed; created a cron job to curl relevant tracking pixels once a month.
I've been using Trocker (<a href="https://trockerapp.github.io" rel="nofollow">https://trockerapp.github.io</a>) for some time already and sometimes I get surprised by how many emails contain read-tracking.
Note that Google experimented with preventing read receipt tracking while allowing images to load, but eventually decided against it as it affected tracking data for their partners.<p>ProtonMail claims to be working on a solution as of 2 years ago[1] but has not yet shipped anything in this domain.<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17611361" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17611361</a> (ProtonMail employee, responding to <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17610732" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17610732</a> )
I believe that rule zero that every developer should follow is "fight for the users". This is a great example of such: Regardless of how useful it can be for certain businesses, the combination of unreliability with the potential for abuse just makes it a net negative experience for the users.<p>And that it can save their company in the long run means that everyone wins. Or at least I hope so; they're doing the right thing.
Superhuman seems to have encountered this last year and they disabled read receipts by default:<p>- <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681655/superhuman-email-app-spying-controversy-policy-change-read-receipts" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681655/superhuman-email-...</a>
- <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681655/superhuman-email-app-spying-controversy-policy-change-read-receipts" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681655/superhuman-email-...</a>
Email is a fickle technology, what with the state of anti-spam technology and SPF records, and DKIM, etc... The odds of an email going through really aren't as certain as they were 20 years ago!<p>That said, we use tracking pixels in our support ticket system because we often do have certain clients who simply can't receive email from Zendesk for whatever reason. The read receipt gives us a positive signal that they received it, or conversely if we _don't_ see a read receipt, it's a low quality signal that maybe they didn't receive our response.
Read tracking is a feature of many/most popular chat clients (certainly hangouts, messenger & whatsapp), and anecdotally it seems to be valuable. Of course, everyone would love to see the read status of other people yet be able to control their own read state (there are endless browser extensions promising this for chat apps, a tremendous self compromise vector). Will it ever be possible to offer this in a federated system or will it be limited to the walled gardens?
I adopted a strict <i>need to do</i> policy when it comes to any kind of non-personal communication online. I have zero notifications, I don't open 99% of my email, I just delete them and I certainly don't open anything twice once I'm done with them, I just archive them. I have 12 items in my inbox right now. I also apply this to my phone, and my other desktop stuff. I can live my life more or less like in the '90s. I didn't even know that this feature existed until now because I just annihilate anything that even remotely looks like spam or ad. Another thing I do is I disable javascript on any site where I see anything I don't like (like popups) and if it doesn't work it goes on my personal blocklist and I never see that site again.
I could never understand how it became so popular to obtrusively track email reading. 70% of the time it works all the time!<p>You know what, we could prevent maybe like over 75% of all domestic violence by installing surveillance cameras in every home, good idea right?
Thanks for doing this. Love seeing privacy coming up front and center. FYI- if you're using web-based email (e.g. Gmail), a browser extension like PixelBlock will zap most shady trackers. I would love it if there was a Hey-like mobile client for Gmail (and other email providers). It's still hard to block this tracking on mobile.
Hmmm. I wonder if it is legally possible to sue any company/recruiter who sends you emails with a tracking pixel. Since you have not accepted any EULA you can claim surveillance. And depending on the state, if you were not aware of the surveillance it is illegal.<p>It is stretching an idea, but I want this to happen to stop them.
Ugly Email extension[1] can inform and block email tracking pixels on Gmail.<p>[1]<a href="https://uglyemail.com/" rel="nofollow">https://uglyemail.com/</a>
What about click tracking from email? This is more reliable (server side) and a stronger signal of interest. Of course, you only track clickers and might have false positives if mail clients follow links for some reason but I doubt they do from the data I personally use (Mandrill click tracking). Also, there is a user action which makes tracking a bit less dirty, but still, not opt-in.
If it only takes "a minimal amount of creativity ... to come up with scenarios where people can misuse read tracking" why did they build the feature in the first place?
GDPR killed read tracking, go EU! Keep flexing as a 27-30 nation bloc! You are built for the 21st century when no other union, regulatory body or country <i>consensus system</i> is!
Marketing guy here.<p>75%-80% open rate for many of my campaigns tells me the title is misleading, those pixels are firing in all the major providers.<p>Putting people in email/SMS funnels based on which emails they read is ENOURMOUSLY beneficial to my clients.<p>This is something that's really very basic.<p>Client Sells Widgets. He sends 3 emails to email base on small widgets, green widgets and cheap widgets.<p>If the client opens one of these but not the other, does it not make sense to send further information that is relevant to their interest? I mean, if they open the green widgets email on my funnel, they will be getting A LOT MORE green widget emails because they will be moved from funnel to funnel based on their activity or lack thereof.<p>Good email tracking is part of good marketing. Something I do see commonly is tech founders looking down on marketing. This leads to low budgets and attracting low quality candidates. Modern marketing tools are like machine guns. And most marketing people are like chimps. So that's why you see silly emails like 'I see you are opening my email, why don't you answer' - which is insane from a marketing point of view, why creep people out? So silly.<p>Good open rate data gathering results in you not knowing that it's being tracked. You simply get more targeted stuff and less stuff that is outside your interest.<p>Back in 01 when I started in digital marketing, good attribution of sales and marketing was something people spent 7 digits creating custom solutions. Now we can string a few SAAS providers together and get amazing details. It just needs to be set up intelligently.<p>Having said all of this: of course I don't allow images to display by default on my email provider. But I'm privacy minded and most people aren't. Which is fine, the world is diverse and that's a good thing. I love choice.