Solved Inbox full of promo emails? 80% are tracking you, new report warns

Billions of holiday marketing emails have turned inboxes into a de facto surveillance tool, Proton Mail says.

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Using a controlled Proton Mail inbox, the team captured every email sent by the largest US retailers (with physical locations) from Nov. 4 to Dec. 1. Each marketing email was linked to its timestamp, sender, subject line, and any embedded tracking links or pixels. The emails were then collated with public data on customer volume, including loyalty membership counts and benchmarks.

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Now consider how often we are tracked when we click any of these messages, since 80% of these retailers include tracking pixels.

These small, invisible images, as well as tracker links, are able to log information on our location, the time an email is opened, and our device type, all of which help retailers build a profile on us and potentially our shopping habits.

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I guess that's no surprise. If I don't do business with the sender it gets marked as spam and straight to the spam folder.

I configure my domain email to kill SPAM before it ever makes it to my inbox, but a few still get through. However, between Thunderbird junk filtering and my domain email filtering, I probably only see a few SPAM emails a week. When I do see one, I flag it so it doesn't make it through again. It's a continuing process, but the only way I know to keep them at bay.

I never click on a link in a SPAM email, they just go right to the bit-bucket.