Update July 3, 2019, 3:47PM ET: This article has been updated to include additional information about email clients.
Update September 3, 2019, 7:35PM ET: This article has been updated to include directions for disabling image autoloading on Gmail for iOS.
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 using software like MailChimp to embed tracking software into the message.
How does it work? A single tracking pixel is embedded into the email, usually (but not always) hidden within an image or a link. When the email is opened, code within the pixel sends the info back to the company’s…