[jonas-w]

Later on they said they use Mailtrack [0]. I looked at their FAQ and they just use a tracking pixel. I don't really think that mail clients in a coorporate environment (i.e. Apple) download external images automatically. Mailtrack seems to be confident, that only 5-10% of recipients aren't "trackable" [1], but I haven't seen a mail client that by default downloads external media in a while.

[0] https://mailtrack.io [1] https://mailtrack.io/hc/en-us/articles/360005941037-Why-is-M...

[ridiculous_fish]

See my peer comment: Apple Mail really does download external images automatically, on a server to hide your IP address. It then rewrites those emails to reference the cached images from the server. Every tracker pixel sent to a mail account with this feature will be counted as read, whether or not the user opens it.

[ComputerGuru]

Gmail does that too, no? I remember an HN discussion on this many years ago.

Here, I found a corroborating link from 2013: https://www.litmus.com/blog/gmail-adds-image-caching-what-yo...

[jonas-w]

Ah I didn't see that one, they mention this on another page [0] (scroll a bit down). But they mention also that it still reliably detects views and that google released a new feature a while ago "dynamic email", which automatically loads but can also be disabled.

[0] https://mailtrack.io/blog/google-email-tracking-gmail/

[jonas-w]

Maybe my knowledge about Mail clients is a bit skewed, because I'm using open source Mail clients on every platform (Thunderbird, K-9 Mail, Evolution), and they always block External content by default. But I thought this was the standard today, but I guess loading them on the server is a bit more UX friendly instead of blocking remote content, although I wouldn't want it.

[withinrafael]

The Windows Mail app still does this by default. And I know folks that use it over the thick Outlook in corporate environments. (Yikes, I know.)