Hi Fellow HN'ers,<p>Author here.<p>Happy to answer any questions or comments.<p>----<p>If you don't mind me hijacking the conversation, I'd like to pose two questions to HN:<p>> Alternatively, I considered calling it ‘UntrackMe: Remove tracking from email newsletters’. Which sounds better?<p>and<p>> I don’t know if it’s worth the effort to do this. Do many people still read emails in plain text?<p>What do you guys think?<p>Thanks for reading!
Playing devil's advocate here, but these trackers are useful for the newsletter publishers to know what content is interesting and what isn't for their readers.<p>On the other hand, I agree with your argument in regards to security.<p>Alternatively, you could include in the processed email both the original link (tracked) and the destination. Then, you as a reader can decide if you want to be tracked (and give feedback to the publisher) or not.
Initially I liked your idea a lot. But in the current set up it is a hard sell:
You preserve my privacy (I read html mails), but you get my Email address and newsletters I like. Facebook needs a couple of likes and can create a psychological profile of you. Now it is a question of trusting a random guy on the internet to be better and not sell my data to the highest bidder.
Maybe open source could address this to some extend. Ideally a gmail or outlook add-on that is doing what you described, with the option to use a proxy. But I personally would probably not pay for that.
The super-long URLs that you see are already linked to the email address (and other contact details) that you provided while signing up for the newsletter. So, clicking it yourself, or via the the proxy script, will not change much. They really just track whether you open it or not, so they know the popularity of the content.