How to Detect and Stop Email Tracking in Gmail

There’s been a lot of talks recently about email tracking. What used to be a business tool, or a technique used by a niche of power users, is now common and even enforced in a new wave of email clients.

Emails are generally tracked via an image called “pixel-beacon”, or “tracking pixel”, which is usually just 1px wide and invisible. As soon as you open an email, this image is downloaded by your email client, which silently sends some personal information – like your general location and the device you’re using – to the sender.

We don’t think there’s something inherently wrong with this technique, but there should be more awareness around it and users should be fully aware of email tracking.

A recent example of how email tracking can be forced on users came from Superhuman, a startup making an invite-only and expensive email client focused on productivity and good design.

Mike Davidson explains why email tracking like the one Superhuman does can be harmful:

It is disappointing then that one of the most hyped new email clients, Superhuman, has decided to embed hidden tracking pixels inside of the emails its customers send out. Superhuman calls this feature “Read Receipts” and turns it on by default for its customers, without the consent of its recipients. […] If you send an email using Superhuman (no matter what email client you use) […] this is what you see: a log of every time someone has opened your email and what location they opened it from. That’s right. A running log of every single time you have opened my email, including your location when you opened it. Before we continue, ask yourself if you expect this information to be collected on you and relayed back to your parent, your child, your spouse, your co-worker, a salesperson, an ex, a random stranger, or a stalker every time you read an email.

How to Know When the Sender is Tracking You?

To fight this trend, we decided to go in the opposite direction and implement a new feature in our Mac email client Boxy Suite.

Starting today, you’ll be able to detect email tracking. Here’s how it looks:

Boxy Suite will search for a “tracking pixel” inside the email body, and match its URL to a little database to find out what tool is used to track the email. We love the idea of empowering our users and protecting their privacy, so this update brings us closer to this goal.

If you want to try this, download Boxy Suite now (there’s a free trial with a credit card, which you can cancel anytime).

How to Stop the Email Trackers?

Method One: Look for External Images

Email service providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook already use a proxy for images, so email trackers don’t know when and how you’re reading an email, but they still know that you’ve opened the email.

To stop this, you can disable external images by default in Gmail, following these instructions:

  • Click on the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner
  • Select Settings
  • Under the General tab, find the Images section.
  • Tick the Ask before displaying the external images bubble.

Even if you disable external images, Boxy Suite will tell you when an email has a tracking pixel anyway, so you’ll be able to decide if you want to load images or not based on that.

Method 2: Don’t Click the Link

We don’t recommend opening links inside an email especially when it’s from an unknown sender. If the email has links to see any sort of email content, then only click on it to let the sender know that you’ve read their email. However, recently spam emails have taken over inboxes and the best way to keep yourself away from being exploited is not clicking the links or not opening the email.

Method 3: Look for 3rd Party Email Addresses

Various server-side email trackers send their email addresses or website links with the email. You can look for such addresses and links and check if they are tracking you. To detect if the email is being tracked:

Step 1: Open the email

Step 2: Click on More

Step 3: Click on Show Original

To see all the email and URL addresses in the original message, Press Ctrl + F and type.com in it. This will reveal all the email or website addresses there. If you find any third-party addresses besides your own and your email service, check online if it’s using any tracking service or not.

Few of the email tracking software that you can use are:

  1. HubSpot
  2. Mixmax
  3. YesWare
  4. Saleshandy
  5. Mailtrack

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