All of those obnoxious marketing emails that crowd your inbox aren’t just pushing a product. They’re also tracking whether you’ve opened the email, when you opened it, and where you were at the time by using software like Mailchimp to embed tracking software into the message.
Tracking pixels are typically a single and often invisible 1x1 image inserted into an email’s header, footer or body. You might not see them, but the pixels load when you open the message and feed information back to the sender, allowing them to track you. By using these tracking pixels, marketing companies are taking advantage of the fact that many email providers allow remote images to be loaded by default.
The pixels can collect a lot of data about you. It could reveal your device type and even your IP address.
There is a simple step you can take to avoid trackers: stop your email from automatically loading images, since images are where the majority of these pixels hide. You won’t be able to avoid all of the trackers that can hide in your email this way, but you will stop many of them.
What to do about it
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection will not be enabled by default. You’ll need to turn it on in Settings, Mail, Privacy Protection and toggle on Protect Mail Activity. In macOS Monterey, go to Mail, Mail Preferences, Privacy and toggle on Protect Mail Activity.
Until the iOS and MacOS updates launch, you can set your email client to not load pictures by default, since images are where tracking pixels usually reside. On an iPhone, the option is in your iPhone Settings, Mail, Load Remote Images.
If you are using Gmail, you can stop pixel tracking from the app or on desktop:
Gmail Web: Settings (the gear icon) → See all settings → General → Images → Ask before displaying external images
Gmail App (Android): Settings → Account → Data Usage → Images → Ask before displaying external images.
Gmail App (iOS): Settings → Account → Images → Ask before displaying external images
The browser version of Outlook.com automatically loads external images using a proxy, but you can’t stop these from loading altogether so some data may still be gathered. More granular controls are available in Microsoft Outlook for Windows 10 (via File, Options, Trust Center, Trust Center Settings) and for Mac (in File, Preferences, Reading).
Blocking remote image loading will improve your privacy, but it could also impact your experience – you won’t see images on any emails, including newsletters, until you manually download them. Switching off remote image loading doesn’t stop marketers collecting data when you do load images on an email. True fixes have to be done by the email provider or email client.
Instead there are other options. You could use a free service such as Cloudflare’s WARP app, which is similar to a VPN. This way, whenever you click on a link, your real IP address isn’t revealed.
An add-on such as Ugly Email is another option for Chrome and Firefox that works with Gmail in your browser by scanning your inbox for emails containing tracking pixels, and blocking them.
