Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
All of those obnoxious marketing emails that crowd your inbox aren’t just pushing a product. They’re also tracking whether you’ve opened the email, when you opened it, and where you were at the time by embedding tracking software into the message. Just type “email tracking” into your search engine and watch all the software apps appear.
There are a variety of methods used to track emails. For example, one of the simplest is a redirect link. Let’s say you click a link in a promotional email that leads to the page for a product you want to buy. The link has been coded to be trackable; it will go to another server with a variety of data, like what browser you are using or where you clicked the link from, before it takes you to the article.
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