Linked List: February 26, 2021

Friday, 26 February 2021

MailTrackerBlocker for Apple Mail on MacOS 

Open source plugin for Apple Mail on MacOS, by Aaron Lee:

MailTrackerBlocker is a plugin (mailbundle) for the default Mail app built-in to macOS. Email marketers and other interests often embed these trackers in HTML emails so they can track how often, when and where you open your emails. This plugin works by stripping out a good majority of these spy pixels out of the HTML before display, rendering the typical advice of disabling “load remote content in messages” unnecessary.

Browse your inbox privately with images displayed once again.

There’s a simple installer to download, and the project’s GitHub page has instructions for installing via HomeBrew. I’ve been running it since Wednesday, and it seems to do just what it says on the tin — it blocks many (most?) marketing and newsletter trackers without requiring you to turn off all remote images. When it does block something, there’s a very subtle indication — the small “ⓧ” button turns blue. Click that button and you get an alert telling you what it blocked. Simple and unobtrusive.

MailTrackerBlocker is a cool project Lee has made available for free, but he has a sponsor page where you can send some dough to thank him. (I sent him a one-time donation via PayPal — you should too if you dig this as much as I do.)

Spoonbill 

Speaking of Justin Duke, in addition to Buttondown, he also created and runs Spoonbill, a nifty free service that lets you track changes to the bios of the people you follow on Twitter:

How it works.

  1. First, you sign up. (Duh.)

  2. Then we look at all the folks you’re following on Twitter.

  3. We check every couple minutes to see if they’ve changed their profile information.

  4. If they have, we record it!

  5. Then, every morning (or every week), we send you an email with all the changes.

Daily was too much for me, perhaps because I follow too many accounts on Twitter, but once a week is perfect. And you can subscribe via RSS instead of email — this is a very natural service for RSS.

Mailcoach: Another Self-Hosted Newsletter Service 

“Mailcoach is a self-hosted email marketing platform that integrates with services like Amazon SES, Mailgun, Postmark or Sendgrid to send out bulk mailings affordably.”

Mailcoach lets you disable tracking with a checkbox, and the next version will have tracking off by default.

Sendy: Self-Hosted Newsletter Service Built Atop Amazon SES 

Sendy is an interesting newsletter service recommended by a longtime DF reader:

Sendy is a self hosted email newsletter application that lets you send trackable emails via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). This makes it possible for you to send authenticated bulk emails at an insanely low price without sacrificing deliverability.

You need to host the PHP application yourself (more or less like self-hosting, say, WordPress), but the emails go out via Amazon’s service. Sendy makes it easy to disable tracking pixels, and, even if you do track subscribers, the tracking information never involves any third parties, including Sendy. Just you.

Sendy’s big pitch isn’t privacy but cost: they claim to be 100-200 times cheaper than MailChimp or Campaign Monitor.

Buttondown: Newsletter Service That Allows Opting Out of Tracking 

It’s hard to find newsletter services that even allow you — the purveyor of the newsletter — not to track your subscribers. Buttondown — from Justin Duke — is one option, and it looks pretty sweet. (Markdown editing, for example.) From Buttondown’s privacy feature page:

Many busineses thrive the concept of collecting data about individuals based on their email addresses and inbox usage. (You can read about that here.) Buttondown is different. As a bootstrapped business, I don’t need to engage with data on level. Your information is yours, and yours alone.

Buttondown collects the standard bevy of email analytics: IP addresses, open and click events, client information. Buttondown sends that to absolutely nobody besides, well, you, the beloved customer. And if you want to completely opt out, you can.

By default, Buttondown seems just as privacy-intrusive as all the other newsletter providers:

Track Opens and Clicks — Per-email analytics mean you get an easy funnel of how many folks are engaging with your emails and what content they’re interested in.

Translated to plain English: “Spy tracking allows you to know when each of your subscribers opens and reads your newsletter, including the ability to creep on them individually.” Buttondown’s privacy “win” is that it at least allows you to turn tracking off with a simple checkbox. Most services don’t. I can’t find any hosted service that doesn’t offer tracking period, or even defaults to no tracking.

[Update: Justin Duke, on Twitter: “thanks for the buttondown mention! agreed that defaulting to opt out of tracking automatically is better: the current default wasn’t a deliberate choice so much as an artifact of the initial behavior’s implementation.” He’s changing the default to not use analytics, as of tonight. Nice!]

One message I’ve heard from folks who would know is that two of the reasons for the ubiquitous use of tracking pixels in newsletters are anti-spam tools (anti-anti-spam tools, really) and the expense of sending emails to people who never read them. Newsletters being flagged as spam — especially by major players like Gmail and Hotmail — is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, and spy pixels help alert newsletter providers that their messages are being flagged. Expense-wise, those who send free newsletters want to cull from their lists people who never open them or click any of the links. Sending newsletters to thousands (let alone tens of thousands or more) of subscribers is, relatively speaking, expensive.

I’m sympathetic, but that’s a YP, not an MP, so fuck you and your tracking pixels. I’m blocking them and you should too.

But that’s why the world needs a company like Apple to take action. If Apple were to kneecap email tracking in Mail for Mac and iOS, the industry would have to adapt.