Email Cyber Safety – Stop Being Stalked!

by Valerie Webster | Feb 9, 2022 | Blog

 Another security update from valeriewebster.com to help keep you and your information safe.

What is the security issue?  Companies and online sites (Facebook and Twitter, for example) place a miniscule image pixel in your emails that detect the exact time and date you open your email and report back on whether you looked at it, as well as your location and the time of day, even how many times you go back and open that message.  

Those tracking emails contain an embedded line of code in the body of an email—usually in a 1×1 pixel image, so tiny it’s invisible.  And it’s not just companies hoping to sell to you or predict behavior patterns.  Scammers, business partners and competitors, even your spouse can employ one of the currently available email tracking software packages.  

There are some 269 billion emails sent and received daily. That’s roughly 35 emails for every person on the planet, every day. Over 40 percent of those emails are tracked, according to a study published last June by OMC, an “email intelligence” company that also builds anti-tracking tools.   Google trackers are present on 82% of all web traffic. Also according to OMC’s data, a full 19 percent of all “conversational” email is now tracked. That’s one in five of the emails you get from your friends. 

Research from October looked at emails from newsletter and mailing list services from the 14,000 most popular websites on the web, and found that 85 percent contained trackers—and 30 percent leak your email addresses to outside corporations, without your consent.

Do the big-name email services offer any help?  Gmail retired its practice of reading your emails for targeted ads in 2017. Outlook has never tracked but features like auto-filled calendar events, as well as spam and scam protection, still depend on scanning incoming mail. Because Google, Microsoft and Yahoo don’t encrypt your mail end-to-end, it’s tough to know for sure how much of it they access, privacy experts say.   Unless your email provider is end-to-end encrypted, there’s nothing stopping that provider from accessing your mail. 

So how do you protect yourself and your information?  The following will give you some tools to upgrade your email protection.

1. In Gmail on a desktop, go to Settings -> See all settings -> General -> Images. Hit “ask before displaying external images,” then scroll to the bottom and save your changes.
2. If your Outlook email is a work account or if you’re using the Windows app, images are blocked by default. If you’re using a personal account on the Web, you can block some tracking pixels by going to Settings -> View all Outlook settings -> Mail -> Junk mail -> Filters. Choose to only accept attachments, images and links from people and domains in your safe senders list.
3. Get a privacy protective email service.  These are some of the best.
   1. ProtonMail, a free email service from Switzerland-based privacy company Proton, is end-to-end encrypted, which means your mail isn’t visible even to Proton itself. (And if the company gets hacked — an increasingly frequent problem in the digital world — the hackers couldn’t see your data, either.)
   1. Tutanotais another privacy-oriented free email service.  They offer one email address and 1GB of storage for free.  Tutanota is designed to strip IP addresses from the header of emails, and it can even encrypt metadata.  Users can even send self-destructing emails.
   1. SecureMyEmail another free service works with popular services such as Yahoo, Outlook and Gmail rather than being a replacement.
   1. Mailfence  is also free, users are permitted to get a single email address with 500 Mb of storage.
4. Anti-tracking software – because “Do Not Track” is a joke.  
   1. DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials browser extension
   1. Privacy Badger browser extension
   1. Ghostery browser extension
   1. Ugly Email browser extension for Gmail

It’s easy to assume that what we send and receive in our email accounts stays private. But email is a perfect environment for tracking and big providers do little to stop it.  Your information is just too valuable for trackers to ignore.  They use it to boost sales.  They sell it at significant prices.  Forget self-regulation.  It’s up to you and me maintain our own privacy. 

I hope you have found this information useful.  I will be posting at least one up-to-the-minute security article a month on https://bit.ly/3chtdST.  Feel free to let me know what you think of these updates at [email protected].