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The ability to track users via email allows just about any business to obtain a detailed profile of its
customers, especially when the companies collecting your information conspire together. If a
clothing and a book shop collaborate, the clothing shop learns about your reading habits and can
use this data to market clothes to you based on what your books say about you. This combined in-
formation gathering is what makes adverts seem spooky at times.

Tracking companies also have the ability to rewrite all links within messages. This means when
you click on a link to verify an account or complete a website registration, you can be taken to a
marketing server URL before being redirected to the true destination.

What to do about it

When it’s made available in Autumn this year, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection will not be ena-
bled by default. You’ll need to turn it on in Settings, Mail, Privacy Protection and toggle on Pro-
tect 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 de-
fault, 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 a Gmail user, you can find the option in Settings, Images, Ask Before Displaying Ex-
ternal Images. It’s also worth noting that since 2013, Google serves images in Gmail through its
own proxy servers, which in many cases hides your IP address.

Meanwhile, 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 experi-
ence – you won’t see images on any emails, including newsletters, until you manually download
them.

And of course, 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.
Gmail could do it, but Google is also the world's largest ad company.

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 re-
vealed.

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.

There are also some other privacy-focused email providers that offer remote image blocking by
default, such as ProtonMail. DuckDuckGo is launching an email privacy solution to block tracking
later this year. Another option is to pay for Basecamp’s consent based email service Hey, which
blocks tracking pixels and informs you if the message includes tracking. Or there is Mozilla’s