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Comment by mike-cardwell | Hacker News Reader

This is where I usually jump in and mention a web app I wrote:

Sends an email to you which checks to see how much stuff your email client is leaking. Turns out some email clients load remote content even before you click "Load Remote Images"

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Thank-you. I didn't realise until I tried your tool that gmail is leaking out the fact that I'd opened an email. It runs through a proxy but it is still possible for it to uniquely identify that the email has been opened.

Just noticed that under Settings > General > Images it is possible to turn off the loading of external images. That fixed it, no longer is it loading the images up.

I have a lot of privacy concerns about what Google itself does with my data, but I do like knowing that they help prevent others from surreptitiously gathering data.

This is really cool, thank you!

It shows that with Gmail, you don't need a browser extension to block pixel trackers.

Gmail does that fine by default, just don't display images in the message.

Really? Gmail easily failed this test with flying colors when I tried it: the second I opened the test email, gmail fetched the 1px tracking image, revealing my User-Agent (but not my IP address, granted) to the server.

How did you configure your gmail settings to pass the test? I don't think I changed the default.

As far as I remember, GMail's proxying solution also hides your User-Agent. It sends a fake one in its place which is the same for everyone.

The email privacy test correctly inferred the user agent of the browser I opened their email from when I opened it in gmail.

On Openmailbox, I have "Message queued. Attempting delivery" even after reading the mail, so I guess it's fine

Wow that's a lot even on just iPhone Mail. This should get more attention!

I'm pretty sure the iPhone mail client loads images by default. And... I could be wrong, but IIRC it also doesn't even have a way of disabling this. I don't have one to hand to test with though.

Control panel (or whatever it is called) and in Mail, at the end: load remote images. Slide.

IIRC it is disabled by default BUT I MAY BE WRONG.

Sorry for screaming.

Great app!

For me Thunderbird didn't trigger any test. K-9 Mail triggered the Meta refresh test (but asked me to choose the browser, perhaps because I have multiple browsers installed).

My university email server seems to silently filter out the emails. Wonderful.

Yeah, this happens. That's why it says the following on the front page:

"The email sent by this system contains numerous unusual tricks which will probably offend some spam filters. If possible, you may want to whitelist emails from sender addresses matching *@emailprivacytester.com before continuing."

If you don't have that level of control, I'm not sure what you can do about it.

I tried that.

But either the provider doesn't support wildcards or it is filtering it anyways.

Nice work Mike.

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