5 Things You Should Know About Email Trackers

Peter Steven Ho
7 min readFeb 22, 2022

Also known as 1 × 1 pixel trackers, they’re the data vampires that go undetected in your emails.

An overlay of two photos Geralt from Pixabay provided the phone, hands and envelopes, and OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay provided the pixel Space Invaders.

It’s getting harder and harder to keep your online activities private. Everyone — governments and commercial organisations alike — wants to know your opinion, what you like or dislike, what you do or don’t do online and all your social interactions.

Most of us will no doubt be familiar with the use of cookies. They’re used by websites to track our activity when we visit the website. Some sites are polite enough to ask for our permission, while others aren’t, but there’s little doubt that your activities will be monitored using cookies.

1. Unlike cookies, email trackers don’t need your permission

Current regulations on the use of cookies “limit” the type of information that it can capture, relay and retain. Furthermore, in some jurisdiction, a site must obtain a user’s consent for cookies that do more than what’s legally permitted.

But nothing similar exists for email trackers and that makes its use a free-for-all. Worst still, we don’t even get an option or a right to opt out.

2. You can’t tell if your email has a tracker

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Peter Steven Ho
Peter Steven Ho

Written by Peter Steven Ho

BSc (Hons), LLB. Freelance writer in Technology, Science and Travel. Come join me on a journey of discovery.