Have been reading about Toutapp - a service that can be used to reveal when you've read an email or clicked a link. A marketing department's dream and a privacy nightmare. Loads of stuff online about how it works (embeds an invisible unique image into an email sent to you) but nothing I can find about how to block it. OK - I can turn off images in email - but I'd prefer not to as many emails have legit images I want to see. I've blocked outgoing connections to toutapp.com - but will this do the trick? Has anyone come across this service?
You can use Thunderbird to read your emails and you can combine the default content blocker of Thunderbird with Adblock. The default behavior in Thunderbird is to ask what content do you want to allow from every email. If an email has images from the x, y & z server, you can allow content to be loaded only from the x server.
I just disabled image download in my email client and download it only on demand (when/if I need to download it). You can also use firewall or HOSTS file to block access to certain domains. But this way you will have to blacklist all services that use similar tracking approach.
@ MrBrian et al I used to use Bugnosis back in 98SE days, but it only shows Web bugs & doesn't block them. Still it was a good introduction into the subject, & encouraged me to find out how to block them ever since. http://www.bugnosis.org appears to be dead ! For blocking Web Bugs in IE i discovered Desktop Armor also known as GeekSuperhero http://www.desktoparmor.com/index.shtml Which does a whole lot more than just WB's ! The trial version still blocked WB's & lots of other things after the trial ran out ! Whether it works on OS's after XP and/or with later versions of IE ? Worth a go though. Previous versions of NoScript used to block them, if you had the option ckecked, i did.
