3 ms·
Not only are tracking pixels an invasion of privacy, they've held up in court as proof of receipt. I helped build a product that blocks them at the enterprise
by remyp 7y ago
Not only are tracking pixels an invasion of privacy, they've held up in court as proof of receipt.
I helped build a product that blocks them at the enterprise level without affecting the presentation of the message or requiring end user effort: https://messagecontrol.com https://messagecontrol.com
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- crooked-v 7y agoWhile this looks interesting and useful, there's no pricing info anywhere, so I didn't bother sharing it with anyone at my workplace.
- remyp 7y agoI've always been a fan of upfront pricing, but I don't work there anymore. As near as I can tell not having publicly available pricing seems pretty common for enterprise software.
- GordonS 7y agoThey do say it's for the enterprise, and unfortunately "contact us" pricing is par for the course. It is very annoying though - if I'm interested, I'll need to email/phone. And if I email, nobody will tell me pricing until I speak to a sales bod, at least once, until they figure out how much money they can likely extract from us. Folk selling B2B complain about the long time it takes to convert a lead to a sale, to a PO, to a payment - but these slimey sales tactics are just as much to blame.
- GordonS 7y agoI'm interested in how this works at a technical level - is it implemented as plugins for Exchange and other servers, or is it some kind of proxy that clients connect to instead of directly to their email server?
- remyp 7y agoI'm still bound by various paperwork that (probably) prevents me from disclosing that, but if you root around on the company site you can find a few relevant patents with details.
- GordonS 7y agoA typical enterprise answer, which goes well with my other comment/rant :)
- mywittyname 7y agoIt's probably straight-forward to do. Parse image links from the email, send those links to imgur, and replace the original image links with the imgur ones.
- remyp 7y agoThat's about 1% of the work. Email is old, arcane at times, and has a ton of interoperability and vendor-specific nonsense. Add in the fact that it _cannot_ go down for enterprise and that you have to do all of this at huge scale and it turns in to a pretty tough problem to solve.
- coreyw 7y agoI also used to work at message control. The architecture to support all of the legacy and new technology for email was very hard. Also architecting a system to ensure that it would never go down completely was a large challenge. You also have to understand how providers deal with email to make sure delivery is never affected. We had to ensure 100% delivery and never fail.