
MailTrackerBlocker – email tracker and spy pixel blocker plugin for Apple Mail - guessmyname
https://apparition47.github.io/MailTrackerBlocker/
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techsupporter
This plugin is awesome but one thing I've noticed lately is several financial
institutions use tracking pixels to verify e-mail addresses and if you don't
open an e-mail in a way that loads the pixel once every so often, they drop
you from paperless statements.

I've run into this with Capital One and Discover. Every year I have to log in
and click "yes I want paperless statements" and then 11 statements later I get
one in the mail with a message about "we miss you, you're not opening our
e-mails so here's a paper statement unless you tell us you want e-statements
and you open our e-mails." Never mind that I log into the mobile apps and web-
based account management systems multiple times per month...

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awinder
Just making sure but do you ever click through on an email link or do you just
use it as a notification and then go and log in? I’m curious if they just need
to be looking at click + open events or if that wouldn’t even help in this
scenario.

~~~
8organicbits
Note, of course, that the former increases your risk of accidentally visiting
a phishing site.

I kind of wish banks didn't put links in their email.

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spzb
Doesn't Mail do this by default by not loading remote images?

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m463
Note that apple has a bug, and has had it for years and years.

If you have it turned off it won't load remote images...

EXCEPT: if you forward an email - it will load them all, all of them. This is
especially troublesome if you want to forward a phishing email to IT.

(thank you little snitch. also I am not using the latest catalina apple mail)

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LeoPanthera
You can bypass this by doing "forward as attachment", which you should be
doing anyway, since it preserves the headers.

~~~
PostPlummer
Thanks for posting this.

Your friendly email inspector who needs to explain this x times a day.

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imposterr
Many email providers have dealt with this by proxying all external image links
in emails through their own services.

See Gmail:
[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?p=display_imag...](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?p=display_images)

See Fastmail: [https://fastmail.blog/2014/09/16/better-security-and-
privacy...](https://fastmail.blog/2014/09/16/better-security-and-privacy-
through-image-proxying/)

Although, I'm not sure if these protections extend to those using third party
email clients with these services.

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techsupporter
> I'm not sure if these protections extend to those using third party email
> clients with these services

In Fastmail's case, those protections don't extend. I've tested this and
Fastmail rewrites the image URLs when viewing through their webmail client but
passes the message unmodified when fetching via IMAP.

I understand why they'd do this but I'd love to have a setting that says to do
this privacy rewrite when using an external client.

~~~
imposterr
Thanks for clarifying. Might be worth shooting them a message to ask for this
feature. They've always been good about fixing bugs and at least responding to
requests, even if they decide not to pursue it.

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captn3m0
Is it possible to port this to iOS?

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wyxuan
Im pretty sure plugins aren't supported for mail on iOS, but fusion of macos
mail and ios mail in future w/ catalyst apps might allow it.

otherwise, you can just disable external image loading

