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Difficult to feel pity for business models built on abusing HTML capabilities to track email viewing. I don’t load remote images by default, so this already do
by toxik 5y ago
Difficult to feel pity for business models built on abusing HTML capabilities to track email viewing.
I don’t load remote images by default, so this already doesn’t work for me. However, basically every mail platform creates tailored links to track click engagement. So you’re screwed anyway, just maybe a little later.
- techsupporter 5y ago> However, basically every mail platform creates tailored links to track click engagement. Yep, even financial institutions do this and half of them don’t even use domains they own for the tracking links. Years and years of “don’t click on suspicious links” out the window because bank.example.com/creditcard is turned into 4828fjfneo848.totallyfine.adtracker.thirdparty.example.org I hate all of it but nobody seems to give a shit (nor do they care to implement proper 2FA to effectively guard against phishing) so whatever. If people have their accounts drained because marketers gotta get that sweet engagement metric, what does it matter any more?
- kergonath 5y ago> I hate all of it but nobody seems to give a shit I hope this will change. More companies need to make some noise about it.
- lttlrck 5y agoA pet peeve is unsubscribe links are frequently on an obscure domain that has found it's way onto Adblock lists. That's got be by design.
- wlesieutre 5y agoIf something makes itself difficult to unsubscribe you could always feed it to the spam filter
- bentcorner 5y agoWhen I unsubscribe from a mailing list I know I didn't sign up for, I'll also hit the report spam button in the hopes it gives them some negative gmail juju.
- mkr-hn 5y agoThis does get reported to the sending platform. Stuff like Mailgun and Mailchimp will show you a rate for it, and they do suspend if it gets too high.
- jtbayly 5y agoDepending on where you do it, yeah, it works. In the gmail interface for gmail, but also in the unsubscribe reason box for the sending platform. Both work.
- eloisius 5y agoDo both, but definitely do the spam report via Gmail or your email provider because that dings the platform they use as well. Without a threat to their mailability, they'd have no incentive to keep their customers (the person spamming you) honest.
- rabuse 5y agoI do this if my attempt to unsubscribe fails at all.
- foxpurple 5y agoI mark any newsletter as spam if I didn’t intentionally sign up which is 100% of the time
- ssharp 5y agoIt's not uncommon for the unsubscribe links to live on the same domain as the link tracking and other features of whatever email or marketing automation platform they are on, so if those are blocked to prevent tracking, the unsubscribe links would be as well.
- nkrisc 5y agoIf I can't unsubscribe with a single click then it's spam and I report it as spam. They don't give a shit about me, so I don't give a shit about them.
- 3np 5y agoAnd more and more often, unsubscribe links go 403 or even 500 when on Tor or well-known VPNs, while the rest of the site works fine on it. A great way to make me never want to deal with you again is to coerce me to doxx myself to unsubscribe from your newsletter.
- foxpurple 5y agoI find reporting as spam or setting a filter rule is easier than unsubscribing.
- eloisius 5y agoIt's easy: I set a rule in Mail that flags every email containing "Unsubscribe" or related terms with a red flag, and I review and mark them as junk when they show up. Every newsletter is spam because I would never ever sign up for one, regardless of whether I do business with the sender. Either they are illegally mailing me spam from some list that they purchased, or they hid their "please don't send me bullshit" opt out when I signed up for their services, because I would never ask to receive marketing or product updates. It's all spam.
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y agoMFA won’t protect against phishing.
- techsupporter 5y agoThe MFA we commonly use right now won't protect against phishing because, as I suspect you mean, the codes are not protected against being entered into the "wrong" site. Proper MFA, like U2F/FIDO2/whatever-it-is-called-today, will protect against phishing because the visited site won't match the hash needed to complete the second-factor-auth-flow.
- gleenn 5y agoYes it does, maybe not directly. Two examples, both 1Password and my Yubikey only autofill passwords based on the domain. I immediately get a tingle when I go to autocomplete a commonly visited website and it doesn't fill ... time to immediately inspect the URL for phishing etc. Those tools have definitely saved me multiple times.
- geoduck14 5y agoMy work touts the "look at links before you click!". But they also auto forward all email links to a service that scans the link for malicious stuff. The result is that when I hover over a link, I get a REALLY long url, like: https://urldefense.company.com?link=blablablablablahlablablalba https://urldefense.company.com?link=blablablablablahlablabla...... And I can't actually read it.
- nofunsir 5y agoMy work actually visits the url ahead of time. This sucks when the link is a one-time-use only code.
- cimnine 5y agoSounds like a great target for Server Side Request Forgery, https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Server_Side_Request_Forgery https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Server_Side_Request_.... Could be fun to try if that software also visits links for internal-only applications, should such exist in your corp.
- smcl 5y agoThis is pretty common and something that bit us last year - enterprise Outlook 365 (or some extension? idk it was def only O365 though) added some security features that would make a HEAD request to any links contained in an email. This messed up our (admittedly antiquated) process for activating users and resetting passwords as it consumed the one-time code our systems generated for them, as you mentioned. Because the app that handled this was old and in the process of replacement we didn't want to invest too much time in rewriting it all, so a quick and easy fix was to have a handler specifically for HEAD requests to those activation and reset resources. The link protection started issuing GET requests a little while after, so we ended up having to add an extra confirmation step so the user had to click something after the link was followed. To be honest the original process we had maybe wasn't 100% perfect - users can double click links for example, and would see a message that the link had "expired". So from a UX perspective we maybe should've had the extra confirmation step before activation/reset to begin with. But I'm in two minds over email providers following all the links in your emails, it feels a bit creepy
- 0-_-0 5y agoCould Apple preload those links too the way they want to preload the tracking pixels? (I don't know much about web tech)
- deergomoo 5y ago> Years and years of “don’t click on suspicious links” out the window because bank.example.com/creditcard is turned into 4828fjfneo848.totallyfine.adtracker.thirdparty.example.org I got an email from my bank (Barclays) a couple of months ago that literally took me several minutes to determine whether or not it was a phishing email. It wasn't, but it used badly compressed jpegs for the Barclays logo and the call-to-action button, the link attached to the button had no verifiable connection to Barclays, and for some reason it used backticks instead of apostrophes in the copy. When I finally did click the link I was half expecting to be taken to a page saying "you moron, this is obviously a scam" in 96pt font.
- dwighttk 5y agoI spend about 10 seconds at most thinking about if my bank sent me a spammy looking email and then separately go to the bank site and look for whatever they were supposedly talking about. Rule of thumb: never click on the link.
- devoutsalsa 5y agoI just don’t click on those links, except on accident because some jackass made it impossible to copy/pasta the URL on my mobile device because I couldn’t see what the URL was in a preview window.
- nickfromseattle 5y agoDelivery rates, AKA staying out of spam and getting into the inbox are correlated to subscriber engagement on your emails. The more often subscribers open + click a link, the more likely the mail server will let it in the inbox. If you blast 10,000 emails, and noone clicks or engages with your email - you'll kill your domain's delivery rate. One of the methods email marketers use to keep their email delivery rates high is by removing subscribers that don't engage with their email. Preventing email tracking prevents marketers from removing uninterested or unengaged subscribers from their lists.
- bjustin 5y agoClicking links doesn't sound like the sort of thing that email servers would know about one way or the other. Likewise for engaging (or not) with emails at all. What setup do you have in mind where this is the case? Given that AFAIK Apple Mail downloads entire messages regardless of whether they're opened, Apple's change here doesn't seem likely to affect delivery rates in this way anyway.
- Nullabillity 5y ago> Likewise for engaging (or not) with emails at all. What setup do you have in mind where this is the case? If you use IMAP (or basically anything else than POP) then your email client reports the read status back to the server.
- giantrobot 5y agoYour IMAP server doesn't report read status back to the sender. Unless your e-mail provider is an advertiser *cough* Google *cough* the advertiser doesn't know if you read a message just because the IMAP server marked it as read. Also an IMAP server's read status doesn't mean someone manually interacted with an e-mail. If you mark messages as read in bulk, even if the provider reported that status to an advertiser, says nothing about engagement.
- jcranmer 5y ago
- jonplackett 5y agoWhy can't apple just allow some kind of pixel that doesn't reveal user identity, or strip user identity from what's already being used. I don't really mind someone knowing I opened an email, just like I'm fine with a website knowing I visited (say using plausible.io rather than google analytics). I get that that's useful to them for non-nefarious reasons.
- gnicholas 5y agoApple can't strip identity from the existing trackers because there's not a separate and distinct part of the tracker that encodes the user identity. It's integral to the tracker itself, which makes this an all-or-nothing proposition.
- jonplackett 5y agoI guessed it would just be some url variables on the end of each image, is that not how it works?
- pavel_lishin 5y agoSure. But if you strip those out, then the pixel itself no longer has any value to anyone.
- jonplackett 5y agoOr can't you just load it but with a proxy - they get to know it got opened but from a fake IP.
- symfoniq 5y agoA common technique is that somewhere in the email you'll see something like: <img src="https://example.com/cd726f02-d2f4-4c0e-a717-e69044180c59.gif https://example.com/cd726f02-d2f4-4c0e-a717-e69044180c59.gif" height="1" width="1"> The image filename is a UUID. The UUID is of course unique for each email sent, but the Web server is configured to serve the same image for any given UUID (after recording the UUID as an "open" into a database). There isn't a way for an email client to be certain that the image is or isn't a tracking pixel.
- asdff 5y agoThere are browser extensions that clean these links
- esotericimpl 5y agoThis seems pretty easy to mitigate. Instead of tracking opens with the pixel, make the first image loaded in the email the “tracking image” voila you now can create a unique link to track for each email.
- pabs3 5y agoI noticed that WikiPedia does something that would work for you; if you don't login and click the link in the email, they stop delivering wiki page change notifications.
- Grustaf 5y agoIt’s a lot less creepy to track active engagement like opening a link though. And probably more obvious to people that it might happen.
- gwd 5y ago> I don’t load remote images by default, so this already doesn’t work for me. However, basically every mail platform creates tailored links to track click engagement. So you’re screwed anyway, just maybe a little later. Right, but I don't mind if companies I'm actually doing business with track my engagement. For newsletters I've actually signed up for, clicking the "load remote images" and/or on personalized links helps them with their business model, so why not? If I don't trust them with the data, I probably wouldn't sign up for their list anyway. I'm more worried about randomly being tracked by who knows what person or organization. With the "don't load remote content by default", I have control over when and how I get measured.