Many of you might not be aware of the fact that you are being tracked using the mails you receive. We all know how user’s data is exploited these days and then used by some for targeting the customers while some just use to scam the users. So you are being tracked using your emails like when do you opened the mail, clicked on which links, your device’s info and sometimes even your current location as well. So we will discuss about how to prevent email tracking as well as how to detect email tracking .
First of all no one should be tracking such information and that too is done without the permission of the user is even worse. It feels like a direct attack on your privacy. Here I have listed some methods of how you can protect yourself from such online tracking. But first learn how this email tracking works.
How Email Tracking Works?
So there are basically two ways in which you can be tracked using your emails, firstly by embedding images in your email and secondly using links.
Email Tracked Using Images:
In this way very small images of pixel size 1×1 is embedded in your email and because of this small size the image is invisible to the user. The image is called pixel-beacon. These images connect you to tracking server software without your knowledge.
Email Tracked Using Links:
Some external links are attached to your email and as soon as you open these links you current location and device info is sent to the tracker.
How to detect Email Tracking ?
Here we will discuss on how you can find out whether a email you received tracks you . Let’s understand how to detect email tracking in Gmail or any other email clients .
1. Look for External Images
Most of the leading email service providers ask for user’s permission whether to open external images or not. This way you can decline this request but should be careful as you may decline images containing some information. Also consider large number of images as an alarm to some kind to tracking.
2. Don’t open the link
Sometimes the sender sends you link to read the content of the email on that link. Beware never open such links as they are most of times to track your information. As soon as you open such link your location and info are sent to the desired party.
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3. Look for third party Email addresses
Some of the trackers send you along with the email, the server’s side email or some website URL. Now click on the options for the email and Click on option Show Original Content. Here use the Keyboard shortcut Ctrl + F to find some keywords to judge whether email can be tracking you or not.
The search for keywords can be like Track, Tracking, .com or Yesware (a quite well known email tracking service provider). This way you can judge the nature and purpose of the email yourself.
Detect & Disable Email Tracking automatically :
Detecting such fraud emails manually is neither foolproof nor quite easy. So we have a number of third party tools which can perform this task for us with much better accuracy. One such tool is Ugly email. It is available as an extension in Google Chrome.
Ugly email automatically detects all the tracking emails and blocks them. It is one of the best tools available for this. It also tells you about the tracking service used in the tracking email. It forms an eye in front of the tracking emails.
The only issue is that it is limited to Google chrome and Gmail users. But there are other tools as well such as PixelBloc and Trakbuster.
There are also so many email tracking apps for Gmail , Outlook and other popular mail client services available . If you are someone who rely on chrome browser , then you can add chrome extension for Email tracking to detect & prevent email tracking .
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