Hacker News Reader

Comment by remyp | Hacker News Reader

Not only are tracking pixels an invasion of privacy, they've held up in court as proof of receipt.

I helped build a product that blocks them at the enterprise level without affecting the presentation of the message or requiring end user effort: https://messagecontrol.com

View on HN

While this looks interesting and useful, there's no pricing info anywhere, so I didn't bother sharing it with anyone at my workplace.

I've always been a fan of upfront pricing, but I don't work there anymore. As near as I can tell not having publicly available pricing seems pretty common for enterprise software.

They do say it's for the enterprise, and unfortunately "contact us" pricing is par for the course. It is very annoying though - if I'm interested, I'll need to email/phone. And if I email, nobody will tell me pricing until I speak to a sales bod, at least once, until they figure out how much money they can likely extract from us.

Folk selling B2B complain about the long time it takes to convert a lead to a sale, to a PO, to a payment - but these slimey sales tactics are just as much to blame.

I'm interested in how this works at a technical level - is it implemented as plugins for Exchange and other servers, or is it some kind of proxy that clients connect to instead of directly to their email server?

I'm still bound by various paperwork that (probably) prevents me from disclosing that, but if you root around on the company site you can find a few relevant patents with details.

A typical enterprise answer, which goes well with my other comment/rant :)

It's probably straight-forward to do. Parse image links from the email, send those links to imgur, and replace the original image links with the imgur ones.

That's about 1% of the work. Email is old, arcane at times, and has a ton of interoperability and vendor-specific nonsense. Add in the fact that it _cannot_ go down for enterprise and that you have to do all of this at huge scale and it turns in to a pretty tough problem to solve.

I also used to work at message control. The architecture to support all of the legacy and new technology for email was very hard. Also architecting a system to ensure that it would never go down completely was a large challenge.

You also have to understand how providers deal with email to make sure delivery is never affected. We had to ensure 100% delivery and never fail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com