Many of the emails that arrive daily to your inbox have as its sole purpose to collect information about you. They are, as you may have guessed, mailings, newsletters that you receive even without subscriber to its services, notifications of all kinds. And who’s going to want that information, you may ask. Well, apparently, more people than one can imagine, and the funny thing is that it is far from illegal. So all we can do as users is to take steps to see if they are tracking our mail and avoid as far possible.
It should take into account that we are talking about a more habitual than it seems procedure. Tracking emails is an old marketing gimmick through which many companies know when and where to open the mail, through which IP, what links you click, what catches your attention and what not. This way they can send advertising more in line with your tastes and therefore more effective for them. This information is useful for them to know how best to refine marketing activities, or simply to know if you pay attention.
Seeking
The messages we send through our email include many details apart from the content itself, such as the browser that you use, used operating system, the IP address. This information that we do not have any value it is important for others, and hence the need for these to watch us and track us. It would be normal that these data were safe, but as just explained, it is not. Google even has a page tells advertisers how they have to carry out the procedure for tracking. Something that, on the other hand, most users know their Gmail services, at no time have given consent to such tracking will be performed.
How to track
There are many companies that offer email tracking services and most works in a similar way. What they do is to insert a transparent image of a pixel that, when you open the mail, this label does reach the server that issued a series of data: if you have opened the message, from which device has been done, what time and where the mail user is located.
How we avoid the tracking
Habitual, intrusive, but also legal, therefore to users we have no other choice than to try to avoid this by our own means. So we can draw extension for Chrome Ugly Mail, created by the developer Sonny Tulyaganov. It is very simple and reports of emails that make use of tracking tools by adding the icon of an eye on your Inbox emails to inform you of those messages to implement some method of tracking. If you pass the cursor over it, you will know from what source it comes.
It is true that the extension has its limitations because it can only be used in Chrome, serves only web mail with Gmail and only monitors tracking by Yesware, Bananatag, and Streak, that even though three major suppliers of tracking services, are not the only ones. However, Tulyaganov ensures that will incorporate more prying eyes with time. If you want to directly block tracking, your tool is PixelBlock, another extension for Chrome. This tool will show you a red eye with the number of follow-ups failed within an email along with the source of the trace.