HACKER Q&A
📣 aloukissas

How do you block email spy pixels?


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't without downsides, mainly the fact that it reads all our emails in the proxy server and modifies them (removes the spyware).

How do you do this today? Chrome extension? Blocking all images? Do nothing and let it slide?


  👤 ColinWright Accepted Answer ✓
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.


👤 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.