[mblevin]

Exactly. And it's not just marketing emails.

The dichotomy between "marketing tracks, 1-to-1 emails don't" is false. There are hundreds of millions if not a billion installs of people using tracking for 1-to-1 email.

Sales people use dozens prospecting tools like Outreach.io, Salesloft, etc for tracking.

Likewise, millions of individual consumers use tools like Gmelius, Mixmax, Streak, etc.

This feels like either manufactured outrage or willful ignorance by a community of supposedly technology-savvy people who should know better.

[filmgirlcw]

That’s disingenuous on a lot of levels.

First, tools like Streak have been criticized for years. And something like MixMax which is sold as an email marketing platform thing is scuzzy and gross, but it’s fairly clear to the person signing up what it’s for and that it’s for people who send out bulk email for marketing purposes.

Superhuman sells itself as an email client for professionals — it sells itself in similar ways to how Mailbox was presented before the Dropbox acquisition.

The investors and sycophants defending this product might say that it’s clear to everyone that this is just an email tool for marketers, but that’s not how its own webpage sells it. If anything, this is selling itself as an email tool for VCs or people doing biz dev.

And maybe every person doing M&A uses tracking pixels, but that seems like a stretch. And for there to not be an ability to turn the feature off (until the outrage), says a lot to me about the core values that went into designing this product.

I would never pay for something like this or for Streak. I understand that emails I get from a marketing company or a newsletter have tracking pixels. I’m savvy enough to know others might send them too. But I will absolutely push back on the idea that it’s the expected behavior for all or even most emails, let alone willful ignorance.

[dkhenry]

Email tracking is wrong, and personally I have gone through many steps to try and keep myself safe from it. That being said you are incorrect if you think this is limited to Marketing and Sales. Literally every E-mail in my inbox when I wrote my initial comment had a tracking pixel. GitHub uses tracking pixels when they send you notification of Pull Requests. Square sends tracking pixels for receipts. Every notification I had in my inbox was accompanied by a tracking pixel. Superhuman isn't even the first client to do this. I know that Nylas and Mailbird both had it and I couldn't even figure out how to disable them in Newton Mail on Android. To say this is somehow about Superhuman is to deny the problem, this is an industry wide problem that everyone is culpable for

[filmgirlcw]

You’re talking about transactional emails —- Superhuman isn’t a client for sending transactional mail (that’s automated anyway), it’s a normal email client.

It’s disingenuous to conflate transactional or marketing email tracking with a manual, non-automated email one person sends to another. Yes, I’m sure plenty of people track those emails, that doesn’t make it common or the expectation from a sender. The fact that there is this much upset about this proves that this isn’t the expectation.