There are at least two features that are active by default in email services that should be disabled as soon as possible - they violate privacy and transfer data to third parties. Only a small part of mail services has built-in tools to improve user security. How to get rid of surveillance through letters - in the material.

Turn off spy pixels

E-mails often contain so-called spy pixels that are invisible to the human eye. According to Avast malware researcher Vladimir Martynov, these tiny images blend into the email background.

“When a user opens an email and allows images and other content to be downloaded from the mail (and these are the default settings), they are downloaded from the sender's server,” the expert noted.

According to the expert, such pixels are used to obtain additional information about users. For example, to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular advertising campaign.

Some companies use major email service providers such as MailChimp or Twilio for this purpose. These services analyze customer ads by capturing user data using spy pixels.

Martynov added that some email servers prevent such tracking. To this end, the services upload the image to their own storage, and the original link in the email is replaced.

In this case, the company that sent the tracking pixel will not know anything about the user. Users can also set the download of images and other content only upon confirmation in each individual case - this will avoid spy pixels in any service.

In Gmail, for this you need to go to "Settings", select "All settings". On the General tab, scroll down to Pictures and select Ask if I want to show pictures. After that, you need to go down to the "Save Changes" button.

If you use corporate mail through a browser, and not a separate application, then pixels can also be blocked. You need to go to "Settings", select "View all Outlook settings". By clicking on the "Mail" item, go to "Junk mail", and then select the "Filters" item. It is necessary to specify the item that the user will "Accept attachments, images and links only from people and domains from the list of safe senders."

Check Synchronization

Outlook has features such as auto-populated calendar events and protection against spam and fraud. All these features still depend on scanning incoming messages, that is, they have access to letters. Lynn Ayres, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Outlook, acknowledged that Outlook does not block tracking technology for personal and even business accounts.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo don't encrypt email on their services and are silent about how much information they can collect about users, according to online privacy experts, The Washington Post reports.

In this case, the best solution would be to refuse to synchronize your mail account with any applications and programs that are suspicious. For example, in Gmail, you need to go to "Settings", select "All Settings". Then click the "Add-ons" tab and inside click on the "Management" item.

In Outlook, you need to go to "Options", select "Manage Add-ons" in the "General" section. Among them, the default is often set to send addresses to the Bing search engine, which is also owned by Microsoft. If we are talking about work mail and not all settings can be changed independently, it is worth consulting with information security specialists within the company.

Check for end-to-end encryption

Network privacy researcher Bill Fitzgerald said that most email providers don't secure messages with end-to-end encryption, so they can access those emails.

But there are exceptions. For example, Apple's Mail app has stopped collecting data about the location or time a message was opened by users.

There is also ProtonMail, an email service from the Swiss company Proton. In it, the correspondence is completely encrypted. The company assures that even if they are hacked, hackers will also not be able to see user data.

Germany-based Tutanota is another privacy-focused email service. The service is fully encrypted and blocks all spy pixels by default.

“Emails in your inbox should be treated as calls that you don't know the number of. Don't answer, delete, block the number," Fitzgerald advised.He also recommends treating all marketing emails as spam calls: don't open them if you can avoid it, and block or unsubscribe at every opportunity.

According to him, even a rejection message can be parsed and collected as your profile data. Such information can then be resold.

Alex Bauer, head of marketing at ad-tech company Branch, says email tracking is "much more serious" than the kind of monitoring that happens on social media.

bbabo.Net