
Ask HN: How do you block email spy pixels? - aloukissas
Perhaps the most attractive feature of hey.com is that they block spy pixels hidden in HTML emails from everyone (MailChimp, Superhuman, SendGrid, you name it). As recipients we have no way to give consent to being tracked if we opened an email, where we were when we opened it, etc. However, the approach with hey.com isn&#x27;t without downsides, mainly the fact that it reads all our emails in the proxy server and modifies them (removes the spyware).<p>How do you do this today? Chrome extension? Blocking all images? Do nothing and let it slide?
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ColinWright
I retrieve the email and open it in an editor. I don't render the html ... if
someone sends me an email that's html only then I queue it for another day.

Then I batch process the html-only emails, using lynx locally to display the
text. At no point do any of my processes download anything except the email
itself, and it does that via a raw SMTP connection.

People call me paranoid ... they're probably right ... but I just do all this
as a matter of course, and it barely affects my flow.

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db48x
Most email clients can do this for you already. They either do it by default,
or it's a setting that you can turn on. Either way, they just don't load any
remote resources, which solves the problem.

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aloukissas
Last time I've tried this, it was more of a crude "don't load remote images",
which isn't very visually nice (I'm OK with real images, but not with 1x1 spy
pixels). Any example of an email client that does this?

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db48x
All remote images have the same spying capability. Any request to a remote
server is just as bad as requesting a 1×1 image.

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aloukissas
Maybe the solution is SSR + fuzzying then :)

