So years back when I was still in school I get a notification that I received an email
from my English teacher probably asking me to fix something on some paper or whatever.
And so me, not wanting to do that, went ahead and played Minecraft for hours until much later
in the night when I finally decided it was time to open up this email and actually start working.
Fast forward, the next day, my teacher, let’s say her name is Ms. Alice,
was able to tell that I hadn’t opened her email until midnight with some playful judgment that
I probably should have started working earlier. She had somehow figured out a way to enable read
receipts on her emails. Which is a little weird, because I didn’t really know this feature existed,
and since I don’t need any teachers knowing when or rather when I don’t open their emails,
I went to attempt to disable this feature, only to be told that this feature isn’t really available
on Gmail, at least not from a normal free non-enterprise/educational, @gmail.com account.
So Google was not telling her that I opened the email. That would’ve been my first
guess. But somehow she still knew exactly when I had opened up that email. And see,
logically, someone had to tell her. And it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Google. So who?
And at this point I think I just gave up, probably had better things to do, taking a
stupid exam or something, I don’t remember, but it did stick with me. So today, let’s explore
How People Can Track When Someone Opens Your Email, (without You or Gmail telling them).
First off, read receipts are useful, a lot of people use them, I mean I use them for instant
messaging and stuff like that. I guess I didn’t really like that my teachers could do it, but I
think the much bigger concern here is marketing and spam bots. I REALLY don’t want them knowing
when I open their emails, because if they know, then they’re just gonna send me more marketing
and spam. Yeah, I get it, analytics, data, whatever. I’d like to opt out please, if possible.
So here’s how they do it, the secret formula. So the simplest form of emails is just like sending
a big blob of text, and that text is your message. But it’s actually a little more sophisticated than
that, and if you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ll know that emails are a little
fancier these days. Texts and images and all sorts of goodies. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve seen a
modern marketing email, but they look good! It’s like a mini-website that you can read in Gmail,
and that’s because in a lot of ways it IS a mini website, constructed with the same structures of
our modern web. If you’re familiar at all with HTML, you know you can construct a very basic
website with headers and texts and also images. And effectively, you can basically just send
this thing over and there you have it! A fancy looking email that’s basically just a web page.
But let’s hone in on those images, because that’s the key to our puzzle here. See,
when sending an email or a website, you don’t actually send everything all at once. Text you
can usually send pretty easily, but if you were to include texts AND images,
you’ll find that these things that you send over the internet are going to be
huge. Images are huge. It’s not exact, but think in terms of size: one letter
is equivalent to one pixel in an image. Which is why I can send over the entire script of the Bee
Movie and literally this one small image of Barry B Benson is twice the size of this entire file!
And if you own a web page, you don’t wanna serve that! I mean, think about yourself for a minute.
When you’re sharing YouTube videos, you don’t download the entire video and send the entire
thing in a text message or an email. The internet is much faster than it used to be, for sure,
but even then downloading HD videos, saving them to your computer, and sending them over...
it can be a pain. No! You don’t send the entire video, you send a link to that video
and ask YouTube to serve the video to your friend instead. That way a million people
don’t have identical copies of the same image or video, and the person who “owns” the image/video,
in this case YouTube, is in charge of handing it out to whoever asks.
This is also why, generally speaking, when you load an image on a webpage or in an email,
the text usually loads first, and then the image comes second. It’s because they’re
being pulled separately, and the image is bigger and takes a longer time to get.
So someone sends you this email with a bunch of text. In that text,
if you want them to show an image, there’s an instruction here that says
go fetch me this image from Wikipedia, and then it loads a fraction of a second later.
You send me text, I go ask Wikipedia and any other third parties for the image files. Easy peasy.
And therein lies the issue: There is another party here. Not just me, not just Ms. Alice,
and not just Google. Because Gmail itself isn’t handing you the image, there’s a separate site
that owns and serves the image. So what’s supposed to happen here is I open the email, it says to
load an image from this site. I go to the site that owns this image and say “hey! I was told to
pick up an image from here” and then the guy is like okay let me go get that for you, and hands
me back this image. Fine. Seems harmless enough, but you can do something pretty sneaky here. You
can name your image file something special, like instead of benny-b-benson.png, you can name it,
image-from-ms-alice-to-no-magic.png, and so while they’re fetching you that image, BEHIND YOUR BACK,
the site can ring up Ms. Alice and tell them that NoMagic just opened their email.
Actually, more likely it’s an ID number, and then they look
it up in their databases to find who they’re supposed to notify. But basically that’s it!
It’s as simple as that. A third party who supposedly owns all these images
that are snitching on you to your teachers, by using images that are named in a specific way
to inform the image owner on who they have to call. And usually the actual image is
just a 1 pixel by 1 pixel image so that it’s basically impossible to see, but you know,
the content wasn’t really what was important, all that really mattered was the file name soooo yeah.
So, Ms. Alice partners with this tracking website, let’s call them, email-tracker.com and adds a
reference to a tiny 1 pixel by 1 pixel image to the end of the email she sends you (usually
automatically added with a chrome extension). This image has one purpose: it has a unique file name,
associated specifically with YOU and that specific email. That way, if anyone asks for this image,
Ms. Alice and email-tracker.com knows that you opened this email. After all,
no one else is going to ask for this random tiny nothing image. When you open that email,
your browser goes and fetches that specific image with its specific name from email-tracker.com
who, when asked to get the image, lets Ms. Alice know (usually through the same chrome
extension) that someone asked for the image, and approximately when they came to get that image.
This of course implies that I opened the email, and now Ms. Alice knows, and I’m in trouble.
How do you stop this? Easiest way? Go to your email client, and disable images. Yeah,
everything looks worse, and if it doesn’t feel like it’s worth it to you, that’s fine
it’s your choice, but if you really don’t want anyone knowing when you open up an email,
that’s one way to stop this particular method. And one last thing: If you’re ever upset that
you don’t have images anymore, just ask someone to send you some ASCII art. To make you feel better.