
Email tracking pixel support - akakievich
https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/hack/web-fonts-email
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XiS
Why are tracking pixels still even a thing. Wouldn't this all be solved is the
top 3 mail providers would just decide to hit all embedded resources at the
moment a message is received and proxy or even cache it after? This would
render this method ineffective for the vast majority of receivers

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zamadatix
In order to proxy/cache it they would have to rewrite https resources in user
mail to point at their servers. Technically possible but a PR nightmare for
little gain to them.

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orf
They do this already. Similar to Github’s Cameo service for proxying readme
images.

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zamadatix
Wow, I just checked and yep there it is - google URL! I wonder if it caches
automatically or only when read. If the latter I bet you could game the system
by sending a tracking pixel with a unique source URL. Will have to stand up a
test server and see what resource gets requested when.

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mike_d
It varies by the reputation of the domain. Most images get hit once when the
email is initially opened, and cached basically forever. If you send tons of
tracking pixels to multiple users you'll eventually see the images being
loaded and cached as soon as you deliver the message.

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sys_64738
Capital One uses email tracking to 'verify' your email address. I get a yearly
email from them saying I've not read any of their email but I disable
downloading images. These technical hacks for business purposes are lousy.

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danShumway
This is funny and wonderful.

However, if I can take the joke way too seriously for just a second:

Doing this with emails will just cause your target to think something is
messed up on your end. I'm not sure it would have the desired effect unless a
lot of people were doing it.

In theory, a better strategy would be to inject the font into an environment
where users are primed to assume that if something goes wrong it's the
environment's fault, not the publisher. For example, a website.

I wonder how hard it would be to get an Open recreation of Smelvetica onto
some kind of Smelvetica-specific CDN that everyone could share, and then to
get that CDN url added to EasyList?[0]

Would anyone be likely to install an adblocker over that, or is it more likely
that they would just blame the website?

[0]:
[https://easylist.to/pages/development.html](https://easylist.to/pages/development.html)

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emilfihlman
Mirror because it's obvious parody, which is protected, also because anarchy:
[http://archive.is/zeGxt](http://archive.is/zeGxt)

You can also just clone the repo and checkout something from the history.

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jrockway
That was the most amusing part of the article. They sent Smelvetica a takedown
notice and were satisfied by a quick "git rm <files>". You can still get at
the target of the takedown notice through the web interface;
[https://github.com/tholman/smelvetica/blob/7186794b56c365e6f...](https://github.com/tholman/smelvetica/blob/7186794b56c365e6fabd9b406df301f1987af13d/demo/css/fonts/smelvetica.ttf?raw=true)

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coconutrandom
If you want to Smelvetisize other fonts, I wrote up a quick script and how-to
do it with python.
[https://readevalprint.com/Schmelvetica.html](https://readevalprint.com/Schmelvetica.html)

