https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56071437 Hey's review indicated that two-thirds of emails sent to its users' personal accounts contained a "spy pixel", even after excluding for spam. Promotion of Hey's services? Perhaps, but doesn't invalidate the analysis.
Yes, I knew about this. But from what I understood, Yahoo Mail Basic will block JavaScript so I guess it then shouldn't work. BTW, I never heard of Hey before. https://hey.com
OK my bad, then I misunderstood. Looks interesting, thanks. Now that I think about it, perhaps such a feature can be added to uBlock Origin.
If you are already blocking trackers/malware sites using Adguard or ublock, etc., do you really need to do anything else?
The pixels are embedded in the email itself. Blocking images or viewing in plain text will work, or even some sort of plug-in to remove pixels, as mentioned in the article.
I know many frown on gmail and rightfully so. But gmail has always blocked most images embedded in emails. Still get some tracking though, particularly around tax-time. I swear, even allowing one or two images is tantamount to opening the floodgates. So, yeah, it should be a justified concern, almost like unfamiliar attachments w/pdf/s. Spoiler: block images
Most popular e-mail webmail services block remote content and allow user to unblock it. E-mail client such as Thunderbird also blocks remote content by default. You can even install uBlock Origin for Thunderbird. Good thing about reading e-mail in standalone client is ability to block cookies. You can't log into webmail without cookies (but it may work to disable third-party cookies), but you can fetch e-mails via IMAP without HTTP cookies. With cookies disabled viewing spy pixel or other remote images limits usefulness of this tracking method.
