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The HTTP request will also contain a user-agent header which provides a brief description of your browser and operating system. Because IP addresses are allocated geographically, that’s tantamount to providing location data accurate to what city you’re in.

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Like all HTTP requests, the one sent by your email software will contain your IP address. When the email is opened, the email software loads the image from the remote server by sending it an HTTP request.Ī spammer or marketeer sending a mass mailing can choose to give each email an image with a unique URL so they can tell which recipients have opened their emails. This allows it to reference an image on a remote server owned by the sender (this part isn’t underhand, it’s just how HTML works). You are much more likely to be tracked by embedded images.Ī tracking email has to be written in HTML. It’s not a great technique for email marketeers trying to keep your tracking secret.

If it is recognised then, overwhelmingly, email clients will prompt users and ask if they want to let the sender know that they’ve read the email. Because the meta data is passive it amounts to no more than a plea to your email software to please ask for a read receipt.ĭifferent email clients don’t agree on what a read receipt header should look like so there’s no guarantee your read receipt will even be recognised as one. Read receipt requests are included in an email’s meta data (its headers). Somebody who wants to track you can do two things they can either send an email with a read receipt, or they can send an email with an embedded image (sometimes referred to as a bug or beacon). It’s easy as pie – just sit back, open email as usual, and the email trackers will churn their wheels, no recipient involvement required.īecause email is actually quite simple, there are only a very small number of techniques that systems like Streak can use to track you – and they’re easy for you to disrupt.Įmails are fundamentally inert (in the vernacular they are not executable) so they can’t make your computer run code.įor an email to pull off something like tracking it needs considerable cooperation from your email client and, since you control your email client, that puts you in the driving seat.

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In the place where we all actually live, recipients don’t have to install anything for email tracking to work and nor will they know if their locations and email openings are being tracked. You know that place, right? It’s the place where opt-in is the norm. The bad news is that if you’re thinking that you can just avoid installing Streak if you don’t want marketers, creeps, phishers and spammers to see when and where you opened your email, so sorry to tell you, but that’s just an irrational thought coming from la-la land. Streak may well be in the business of giving marketers the ability to eyeball our whereabouts and our email-opening schedules, but it certainly didn’t invent email tracking – not by a long shot.Įmail tracking is already used by individuals, email marketers, spammers and phishers to understand where people are, validate email addresses, verify that emails are actually read by recipients, find out if they were forwarded and discover if a given email has made it past spam filters. But it’s not, of course, “changing the email game”, as has been somewhat breathlessly claimed. It also gives users real-time location updates. The extension, part of a customer relationship management (CRM) system that includes tools for sales, support and hiring, places email recipients on a map, with big red dots indicating their locations.

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A new, free Google Chrome browser extension called Streak lets email senders using Google accounts see when recipients open email.Īnd, oh my, it also lets senders see who, exactly, opened the email, and where the recipient is located.