More and more of our lives are happening online and there are those who want to follow your every step to either sell you a product or worse, sell your data to other companies. eM Client’s doing its part when it comes to your emails being tracked by introducing the Email Tracking Pixel detection and options to block them.
What is email tracking?
Email tracking is a method used to monitor delivery and reading of a specific email. It makes it possible for the sender of the given message to get notifications or log of the times the email is opened and viewed by the recipient, but it can also provide a range of other details, including personal information.
While email tracking can be misused to get details on what devices and apps you use, your location, IP address or other personal details, it is most commonly used in email marketing, where the use of these tracking methods is common in devising further marketing strategies and helping companies grow – so it is not always nefarious. But we believe you should have the choice in deciding if you want to share this information or not.
How does email tracking detection work in eM Client?
You can tell that a message contains a mail tracking pixel by the target icon visible in the message list. This icon is available with both Free and Pro licenses, so you can be warned either way. You can remove the icon from the message list if you want via the Columns configuration.
eM Client 9: Email tracking icon
In the default setting in Pro version you will also see an info line under the message header with the option to allow email tracking for this specific email if you trust the sender.
eM Client 9: Allow email tracking option
To see how these work in action, you can watch the introduction video to this feature below:
Note: eM Client team continually analyzes new tracking methods and updates the tracking pixels we can detect in the program, so this feature will continually improve over time and will be updated in your installed eM Client automatically.
However, there can be times when a new tracking pixel service is used by the sender and eM Client cannot recognize it yet – so keep that in mind and consider using the other Privacy settings and always download external content and images at your own discretion.
Was eM Client not blocking email tracking pixels before?
The Tracking icon just shows that the message you received does contain a tracking pixel. Some senders always used them, but we did not have the feature to detect them specifically in the past - that is what's new in eM Client 9.
But that does not mean you were not protected from email tracking before - by default, eM Client blocks these mail tracking pixels together with all external images and other external content based on your setting in Menu > Settings > Mail > Privacy. With PRO version you can now decide and set to download the other images that are not used for email tracking and keep the pixel itself blocked.
You can read more on the specific settings here.
Can Free license block mail tracking pixels?
With Free version the functionality is the same as it was in eM Client 8 and older - you either block all external content (including the tracking pixel) or you can manually choose to "download pictures" which will download all, including the tracking pixel.
So you can use the icon as warning to decide if you trust this sender to download all the images or not, even with Free license. Or if you just don't want to see it, you can remove the Tracking icon columns from your message list and use the app the same way you did in older versions.
New to eM Client?
Try it out! It's free and fabulous.
If you’re ready for more, buy the PRO license and enjoy:
And in the meantime, check out our YouTube channel for how-to videos.