Good looking images in your email can breach your privacy by sending the information regarding your location, time when you have opened their mail, the device you are using. If you are email marketer and send newsletters to your customers then it is good to know how you can track your client or when your client or customer read your emails and location of your target. But some bad asses use Email Tracking to hunt the target data.
So if you want to be safe then the most important thing is, you should know How can these incoming emails in Gmail or other mail services are used to track you down.
How Does Incoming Email Track Works?
Most of the Newsletters services provider or hackers use an image in their email and fix the dimension of image 1X1 pixel to make it invisible to you. This image is called pixel-beacon. So if you can’t see it, you can’t figure it out that you are tracking down.
These tracker images send data to the sender about user device, location, time of opening email which links the user clicked and if the hacker or tracker has embedded a link to the email and you clicked that link then the sender can also track you real and current location.
Most of the time many web services providers are using these kinds of tracking to improve their presence and content according to their customer or audience’s interests. But whatever be the reason, these trackings are still being done without recipient’s consent or knowledge.
Here is a small tip which can improve your privacy invasion and stop your tracking in emails.
How to Detect Email Tracking Manually
There are many ways that can work to detect email tracking according to the email content below are most common tracking detecting methods:
Method 1: Look for External Images
If you receive too many images in an email then you should be alert. Most of the email services like Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail or Outlook don’t show external images by default and ask you to whether to load or open the external images or not. In this situation, you need to think about your privacy that these images can be traceable images and according to the trust-ability of sender email, you can accept or decline the request of email service provider to open the external image or not, whenever they ask. This might cost you to oversight an important image from a sender to you. So be careful while deciding on the images sent by the sender is an actual image or tracking image.
Method 2: Don’t Click on the External Link
Most of the hackers or newsletters sender add a link in the text part of the email which they want you to click and this link will take you to another web page and this gives information to the sender about time you have opened the email or your current location etc.
Method 3: Detect Email Tracking by looking for Third-party email tracking services addresses
Many newsletters service provider send the server side tracking email or website URL along with the email content. To look for the tracking, you need to look at the Original Message content, there you need to search for popular tracking services like Yesware or using shortcut Ctrl+F, Type .com or Keyword like Track or Tracking. It will highlight all the keywords, email and website address inside the email content, looking at them, you can judge that it is connected to a tracking service or not.
Method 4: For Chrome Users only – Detect Email Tracking using Chrome Extensions like Ugly Mail, PixelBloc, and TrakBuster.
There are many chrome extensions which you can use to detect email tracking automatically. I have mentioned some of them. Personally, I am using Ugly Mail which works best for Gmail and let you know tracked emails in Gmail.
Ugly Email for Gmail has evolved itself so much that is can detect and disable email tracking emails itself and indicated them by an “eye” icon next to tracking email and also provide you the information about the tracking services used. I have tested Ugly Email many times when I have failed to detect the tracking email and Ugly Email found them in seconds.
Last but not the least, I will suggest you disable automatic image loading in email for better privacy, Your privacy is in your hand.
If you like the tutorial share it on Facebook and Twitter with your friends and families to protect them and yourself from tracked emails and save you from scams.
