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Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

"One metric that some sites evidently use is email sent to accounts that are known to be inactive, which is seen as a sign of a spammy originator. This, seemingly, is where Mozilla has run into trouble. One way to avoid this problem is to track which recipients are actually reading their email; any recipient who doesn't look at any messages for a period of time can then be unsubscribed."

Shouldn't the sites bounce those emails in a way Mozilla can detect and therefore use to prune?

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I seem to increasingly get unsubscribed from mailing lists because of not opening them, which is very frustrating.

Sometimes it's because I'm reading but not triggering their tracking mechanisms. Other times it's because I'm subscribed to lists that I only occasionally read, but want to have available for reference.

Either way: if I've actively subscribed to a list, I have some reason for doing so. I don't want to be unsubscribed!

I'd be happy to add my email address to some whitelist of 'assume I'm reading anything I'm subscribed to', if only it were possible.

Otherwise, maybe I need to forward mails to some service that will open them all in a browser, and trigger all the tracking pixels.

FWIW Gmail does that: it triggers trackbacks from a pool of Google-owned IP addresses that don’t map to any specific users, and then serves themselves the images to the clients. This is why they now load images by default: there’s no more privacy issue.

GMail is itself a major privacy issue.

There is still a privacy issue since Google only caches external images at read-time, leaking the time you read your email to the sender.

I see a huge problem in this. Mozilla likely won't use IP to identify users. They will use the unique link in each email.

To me this reads more as an excuse for even more user tracking. Seems to be the new thing at Mozilla :(

Read the same to me.

Seems that if they were actually concerned for conserving user privacy, their "compromise" should have been approach #1, with more intrusive user tracking a fallback position iff the original "compromise" solution didn't work.

That they didn't even seem to trial a privacy-conserving measure first speaks volumes.

I can only point you to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15484417 and suggest that you go read the actual discussion and understand the context.

"They" were very much concerned about user privacy, if "they" is Mozilla as a whole.

Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, I saw this thread; I did not reply to it because other people got there first and I would just be repeating what they said, but had they not replied I most certainly would have.

That casts a very different light on the situation. Thank you for providing the additional context.

Sounds like they're talking about perfectly valid email addresses that just aren't being checked anymore. I'm sure most people have like half a dozen of those.

> Shouldn't the sites bounce those emails

Maybe they _should_, but in practice they _don't_.

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