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Depending on the platform used to send the email, it's trivial to change that pixel to any other image, ie a brand logo in the template.

On the whole, disabling images entirely is the only real defence against email tracking.

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Or I guess the mail server could just always precache all images at the time of receipt. Then nothing new happens when the mail is read. I think somebody here is describing GMail's approach that way.

gmail's cache hides a users location but you can still tell when they've opened an email, and you can still get a ton of information if they click a tracked link within the email as well.

Then email servers would have to download billions of images of which 99% the corresponding email won't even be opened

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