How you are tracked via email

[CarderPlanet]

Enjoy reading!

Did you know that emails can collect a large amount of information about a user when they open or forward them to other people. However, there are steps you can take to maintain your privacy when using email.

What is the danger?
You receive emails from online stores, social networks and other services. Almost everyone uses e-mail now, whether it is to advertise their products or simply to notify users.

Therefore, many companies want to know for sure if you've read the emails they sent you. At the same time, there are dozens of tools that help them do this. They are easy to use and check in minutes.

With what is known as a tracking pixel, businesses can find out if you've read their email or not. It works in the following way: a tiny, hidden one-pixel image is created in the letter, after loading it when the letter is opened, information about this is returned to the sender of the message. According to security experts, the use of pixel trackers in emails is now huge.

Tracking pixels can provide a lot of information to the sender, including the date and time the email was read and the location of the device being used. Moreover, the one who sent the letter, know, with what kind of mail it read. Third parties can easily obtain a large amount of personal information about the user.

Marketers and creators of advertising mailings claim that this type of tracking is necessary to understand the interests of their audience, and analyze the effectiveness of their advertising. But if you look at the situation from the other side, it may seem like an invasion of a person's privacy. Just imagine, every time you open a certain email, the sender knows about it and gets a lot of information about you .

Prohibit companies from using such tracking pixels unfortunately impossible, but you can take steps to help protect themselves, and learn to recognize which messages contain trackers.

How to protect yourself from emails with trackers
The easiest way to stop this kind of surveillance is to disable automatic uploading of images in the mail service of your choice. However, it is worth considering that in this case your messages will look less attractive in visual terms.

You can do this as follows: log into your Gmail mail, click on the gear icon (top right), open the "All settings" menu and go to the "General" section. For the "Pictures" subsection, set the "Ask if I want to show pictures" option. In the Mail app on macOS, go to Preferences and uncheck the Automatically download images in messages option. In Outlook, click on the gear icon at the bottom of the navigation bar, go to settings and turn off the automatic download of captured images.

How to recognize emails with trackers
There are also more sophisticated measures to prevent tracking of your actions. For example, the free Ugly Email plugin is one of the best countermeasures for pixel trackers. This extension is available for Chrome and Firefox and can protect your Gmail mail from this kind of surveillance.

Once you add it to your browser, you will see a special icon next to emails that contain tracking pixels even before you open them. In the event that you do open the email with the tracker, Ugly Email will take all measures to block its functionality.

Other tools, like Mailtrack, can both add trackers to emails and detect them.

However, it should be borne in mind that if you do not want to open the message containing the tracker, the sender will also know about it. Therefore, think a few times before deleting or sending a specific spam message.

That's all. I hope you enjoyed the article and found the information useful.