Why my emails don't track you

Most newsletters (and some private emails) you receive are watching you read them, I'd rather mine didn't do that.

Tiny invisible images (tracking pixels) silently phone home when your email client loads them. They tell the sender whether you opened the email, how many times, roughly where you are, what device you're using, and which links you clicked.

You think you're just reading an email, but the email is reading you back…

I don't do any of that, and here's why:

It's a trust thing

I help organisations choose software that respects their values. It would be a bit rich of me to then go and spy on their inbox. And I'm on the receiving end of enough tracked emails to have developed strong feelings (an understatement) about it.

If you've given me your email address, that's already a meaningful act of trust. I'd rather honour it by sending you things worth reading than by harvesting data about whether you read them at 7am or at midnight on your phone, in bed (No judgement).

The data isn't even very useful

Ethics aside, tracking pixels are surprisingly rubbish at their job:

• Apple Mail Privacy Protection used by the majority of iPhone and Mac users: preloads all images automatically, making it look like everyone opens everything from everywhere. Others, like Fastmail or Proton, apply their own filtering too.
• Marketing platforms increasingly admit this: open rates are said to be "directional at best". Pixels can even hurt deliverability by triggering spam filters.
• The better alternative already exists. Segmentation that actually drives results comes from asking people what they're interested in: signup questions, preference forms, replies. No surveillance required.

Graphs of open rates feel reassuring because numbers always do. They're clean, they fit nicely on a slide deck, and they give you something solid to point at when someone asks "is this working?". But most of those numbers are fiction: confident-looking fiction, but fiction nonetheless.

EU law agrees, by the way

This isn't just a personal stance. Under the ePrivacy Directive and GDPR, tracking pixels are treated like cookies: non-essential tracking needs your explicit, informed consent (i.e. an "I consent to open/click tracking" checkbox) before it happens, not buried in fine print.

CNIL's 2025 guidance goes further, requiring senders to retroactively disable pixels for anyone who unsubscribes. Otherwise, every time you reopen an old email, it still pings the sender – even after you've withdrawn consent.

Most senders aren't doing any of this properly or even at all. I've just skipped the problem entirely by not tracking in the first place.

What you get instead

Emails that respect your attention and your privacy. No pixels, no tracking, no creepy "we noticed you didn't open our email" notifications.

If something I write is useful, you'll reply or forward it to someone. That tells me everything I need to know. And you chose to do that.