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@rrhoover I turned off images on every client :( I understand why companies and marketers do this but don't think it's necessary for more casual email conversations from friends/colleagues.
@rrhoover do people really do this? I guess I'm stuck to the old, passive-aggressive, read notification request :)
@rrhoover @giordanobc To be fair, I have Signals installed on my Chrome, and it's on for every single email. For those of us who have a sales job, it's really important for our work, which may be a small fraction of the emails we send. To turn it off for the vast majority of emails I send would be impossible -- I would never get anything done.
In contrast, other occupations such as developers and designers don't need this tool to be successful at their jobs. So, do you think it's really fair to judge people just trying to make a living with the skills they have? :)
@percival @rrhoover Being someone who a) has a tracker running by default and b) has had multiple email conversations w Ryan I can only say some of us use tracking for work, and its more of a pain to swap out tracking from one email to the next, than just have it on.
Granted I don't really care about most of the info collected. I need to know if a client or prospective client has opened an email (or a contractor). Someone asks for more info on a project and I send it to them, or I send a list of deliverables I'm waiting on, I need to know when to follow up. I suppose one good options for these email tracking companies would be to let the user (me) white list people so you never have to think about it?
So sorry it looks like I'm tracking you Ryan. I really don't mean to. If only there were better ways to respond to emails. A checkbox that says "I've read this and don't need to reply" or "Favorite" or "On hold" that's also reflected in the sender's email box. Email needs a major overhaul in so many ways.
Realization: sometimes, the easiest way to prompt a reply is to rapidly refresh/open an email they last sent you and set off their email tracker 10 times
So glad to see this extension being made and getting to the top of PH. We (Boomerang folks) have been wanting to make this. This is a serious and major difference between us (Boomerang) and many of the Gmail extensions out there.
Like many of you, I don't think the sender of an email has a right to know my location and what device I'm opening it on just because he/she sends me an email and I open it. But we also see the need for the sender to know if their email has been read.
We believe this is a request from the sender to the recipient that should be explicit. So we implemented it as read receipts. There is a visible image that explicitly says that the sender requested a read receipt and the recipient is given an option to opt out. We don't report location, device or exact time the email is opened.
We have many pushbacks and complaints from our customers and users for not implementing it as an invisible pixel and allowing the recipients to opt out. We have actually lost customers over this. But we believe that developers should stand by what they believe is ethical. Email is a communication protocol and it should serve both senders and recipients. And we should serve not just the senders who are our users but also respect the recipients who are part of the email ecosystem.
I'm so glad to see someone is building a tool to protect everyone.
Love that this exists. Always thought if you can track one way it must be possible reciprocally. Super useful for filtering (especially salespeople).
I'm going to post the counter argument... Email boxes are getting massively overwhelmed. There are more aggressive junk filters, Etc. There's a good chance that emails may get missed - even those Non sales related. I have used email tracking and have had it used against me and I don't see what the concern is. This is not as personal as text read receipts where people actually expect the mode to be more synchronous than asynchronous and get offended... This is like mail and you have a certified slip that someone actually received it...
@obenyoung I do agree that sometimes it is good to know that your email is not buried in someone's inbox. However, I believe that there is a line between knowing if the person received your email and knowing recipient's device, location, time and email view count. In my opinion that just violates the recipient's privacy. Just my two cents :)
Just downloaded it, and saw a few emails have been tracked supposedly.
Is there a way to see specifically what the tracker is? How can you tell whether it's just a normal image, like a logo in a signature, or a tracker?
@sonnyt I can't find another way to give you those feedbacks:
Why not including an option of actually blocking it? I mean, I find it cool to know that the guy is tracking me, but I still open the mail (thanks god). I know another extension does that, but it would be easier to have it all in one place I reckon.
Also, I'd be happy, when I see the little evil eye, to being able to hover it and learn on which tracking system was used. I find some people use a tracking tool very surprising and I would be happy to discuss it with them, but it would be easier if I could tell upfront which one they are using.
Fan of not being tracked in general conversation as well. Also, helps identify the posers that try to sell etc non stop.
Chrome is still pretty pitiful on Macs, especially on high res screens. Safari extension on the horizon?
great extension! Agree that sometimes it's really useful to have tracker for sales/pitch/marketing but more and more people are using it for everyday emails and thats not cool :(
@sonnyt I just tested this with mixmax...doesn't seem to be working with that tracker. I might be missing something though. Cool product!
@sonnyt I just installed this and it's marking plaintext emails from my server (that I am pretty sure aren't tracking anything) as tracking.
@silvamerica that is very strange, can you please email me? I would love to see what's inside of your email that is causing Ugly Email to go off.
Ha - this is just progress in action. Given the pushback here, soon there will be trackers to see if you're tracking email trackers, etc. ad infinitum.
In all seriousness, I think it's a healthy debate - and all the more reason to reinvent email to be more in line with the actual communications we all want.
FWIW I thought Google Wave was a good try (RIP)...
@sasindumendis Gmelius for Inbox provides a feature to detect and block pixel trackers in Inbox: https://chrome.google.com/websto...
Very nice to see this kind of entry/feature supported by the PH community. As a sidenote, I just wanted to highlight that Gmelius (https://gmelius.com) provides detection and *blocking* of email trackers since April 2014. It is available as a browser extension for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera.
Moreover, we just launched Gmelius for Inbox a few weeks ago, so feel free to try it. It is available in the Chrome Webstore: https://chrome.google.com/websto...
Just installed this. Totally creepy seeing which "friends" were adding tracking. I had no idea.
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