From time to time I read a piece by some pundit proclaiming that email is dead; that it’s been supplanted by texting, Facebook, and other social media. Such pieces are, of course, ridiculous but it is true that the usual suspects are doing their best to ensure we can’t have nice things. It started with spam, moved on to scams, and finally became yet another way for Google and Google wannabes to track us so they can target us with advertisements.
David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried co-founders of Basecamp believe Email is too valuable to lose but that Google, Microsoft, and Verizon effectively control the email infrastructure. They’ve started a crusade to rescue email by rebuilding it from the ground up. They have a new application called Hey that aims to fix some of email’s problems. You can read the article above for the details but the thing I can’t get out of my mind is how widespread the use of tracking pixels are in modern email. Everyone, it appears, are using them. The original idea was to implement the “read receipt” functionality but, of course, that’s been subverted to send a bunch of information about the reader back to some server.
I short circuit a lot of this by using mu4e to read my emails in ASCII but a distressing number of emails today really do have to be read as HTML. As soon as I do that, the tracking pixels kick in. Hey has the splendid feature that it blocks tracking pixels. If you’re interested in maintaining some privacy and preserving email, take a look at Hey. It still hasn’t launched but they are taking signups.