Hands-On Tech 289 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Hands-On Tech, can someone really tell when you've opened their email? Stay tuned. Hello and welcome to Hands-On Tech. I am Mikah Sargent, and today we are taking your tech questions and we are answering them. Yes, that is what we do here on the show, and I am, uh, pleased as punch with this next question because it's one I have asked myself in the past. It did not used to be as common as it is now and required some research into the most recent capabilities of this feature. So let's take a look at the question without further ado. This question comes in from Lyle.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:51]:
Lyle writes, A coworker mentioned offhand that she can tell when I've opened her emails and roughly when. I told her that isn't a thing. Email isn't a text message. There's no little red checkmark. She swears she gets a notification. Is she pulling my leg? Oh, I love that. Uh, pulling my leg. That's a throwback.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:12]:
Or is that real? If it is real, how on earth is it happening inside a plain email? And is there something I can turn on to stop it? I'm using Gmail on a Windows laptop. Lyle from Fort Collins, Colorado. Oh, Fort Collins is one of my favorite places in all of the United States, so I'm jealous of you, Lyle. This is a great question, and the first thing that we should get to is the short answer, right? It is a question of whether someone is able to tell that you have opened their mail. I hate to tell you, Lyle, she's not really pulling your leg. Her emails almost certainly have what is essentially a tiny little image in it. It's an invisible 1-pixel image. And when you open your mail, Gmail loads that image, that tiny little image you can't even see, and then the tracker on her end logs the open because when you opened it, again, it sent— it had to pull that image from somewhere.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:18]:
So her tracker goes, somebody pulled that image, and then gives her a notification letting her know that that image was opened. So that is something that is possible. There is a way to keep it from happening, and that's by telling Gmail to ask before actually loading images. And then if that happens, well, there's no loading of that invisible image, and therefore there's no way for it to know that you opened the email. Email on its own doesn't have read receipts, or read receipts depending on who you ask. Right. Out of the gate, we have this sort of nebulous state because, yes, you are correct that there's no read receipts, but you are incorrect that it's not possible for something to be checked. And that's because email itself may not let you get those little notifications on its own the way that iMessage or WhatsApp does.

Mikah Sargent [00:03:22]:
And the app that is sending and receiving, they don't talk to each other on their own, right? Once it's delivered, email doesn't report back. But modern email, when you think about the way that a mail message goes out, it's kind of like a little webpage. It's like a little website. And those webpages, of course, can pull references to images that exist on the internet or files that exist on the internet. And specifically in this case, they're using images because those images, excuse me, are more often allowed in email as opposed to files which are served as attachments. So it doesn't give that same signal. Loading a picture means that when you do so, you are asking someone's server for it, and that request that the server gets is the notification. Now, Google does go into detail about this and says on its own page, quote, sometimes senders may know whether you've opened an email that has an image.

Mikah Sargent [00:04:33]:
But the good news is you can turn it off. So we will, of course, link in the show notes to this page that shows you that you are able to turn images on or off in Gmail. So you can set it to always show images. You can set it to ask before showing images. And in choosing to ask before showing images, you go to the settings menu, you choose see all settings, you scroll down to the images section, you click ask before displaying external images, and then of course you click to save changes. I recommend regardless of whether you're using Gmail directly or you use an email app, turn this feature on that says ask before showing images. I have it turned on across the board. I don't like the idea.

Mikah Sargent [00:05:17]:
Of someone being able to see that I have read their email. So I have this turned on, which basically turns it off, if that makes sense. So what is it that your coworker is seeing on the other end, huh? Because it's not exactly what, what you might imagine. It is. It's not a full and in-depth sort of understanding of what's going on. So the likeliest culprit for the method that she has is that there is a Chrome extension like Mailtrack, which gets added to Gmail. So people will use this. And in that case, there is a checkmark because her sent folder will show 2 checkmarks next to each email.

Mikah Sargent [00:06:07]:
The checkmarks show when a message has been read. It shows, um, When it's been read again, when it's been, you know, the first read of it. Uh, it, you, you said it didn't exist. No, I'm sorry, it does exist. There are checkboxes in her emails and she is able to see those. Uh, the first thing, depending on, on what the subscription plan is, she may even have the ability to know when it's first opened. And then paid tiers give you even more information. Every open, clicks on links within, and then who opened a group email.

Mikah Sargent [00:06:47]:
So if it's sent to multiple people, it can even get into the details of who exactly has opened it. And this is, this is something to, you know, bear in mind if you're considering holding her guilty. It's not anything that's been done sneaky, right, by her standards. Those are the tools that people are using every single day and are told are part of the sort of productivity suite. But it can give you all that information. The first time it was opened, the time and date that it was opened, all of that information can be available all because of a pixel in an email. And there are plenty of other applications outside of Mailtrack that do the same thing. There's a— there are applications called Streak, Mixmaxx, Boomerang, GMass, and then Newsletters, oh my goodness, they are rife with those pixels.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:37]:
So they can, yes, still show that. Now, if you're wondering how this works with sort of a plain email, right, as opposed to within Gmail with that extra extension tied in, a plain email can phone home because of that tiny little image. When she hits send, it adds this invisible little image inside, you open it, So it doesn't do it without you opening it, right? It is only once you open it, then you are sending that notification to the server. So the image address, it's unique to that one email, and in some cases unique to the one recipient. So again, with the specific group emails, and when you open the message and Gmail fetches it, it fetches— The image. that invisible pixel as well. And then her tracker has knowledge of the request, and it shows that you have opened the email and at the specific time that you've done so. Now, there are some protections in place because the tracker server, of course, logs that open and the time, and then, of course, that's where those pings come through.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:59]:
then that's, that's that notification that she was talking about. You know, I get a notification for this. Uh, and Mailtrack itself says it. It says, look, the pixel sends a call to our server saying that the email has been opened and here's how you do it. But it's important to understand that there are some ways where Gmail can kind of protect you through what's called a proxy. So what it does is where before, when you would open up an email, It was your local machine that was loading that image. So your local machine and its IP address was the thing that was reaching out to that server and saying, show me that image. Gmail's Google, essentially its proxy, would hide your location and your IP address, but it would not hide that you opened it.

Mikah Sargent [00:09:50]:
It's still going to show you that you opened it. So this has actually been something that's around since 2013. Gmail will load every email image through Google. own proxy servers instead of straight from the sender, which is great. So that's why it's sort of a notification of roughly when you opened it and not the extra information of location and all of that. So your IP address, your location, details about your computer, if you're going through Gmail, then that's the case. Still, the fact that it was opened, when it was opened roughly, all of that is available. And even the tracker companies say that a Gmail open shows them Google's proxy proxy and not you.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:29]:
So there is improvement in the realm of privacy, yes, but despite, you know, thinking that, okay, I thought that email has improved over time, the security's gotten better and it's more pro— yes and no, because there's still the one thing that your coworker is right about. So again, let's talk about turning it off. We talked about how you turn it off on your, On the computer. But let's talk about everywhere else as well. So again, on your laptop, Settings, See All Settings, General, Images, and then Ask Before Displaying External Images. This is in any browser, Windows or Mac, but you can do it on your phone as well. And that's why I want to talk about both Android and iPhone. In Android, Menu, Settings, Your Account, Images, Ask Before Showing.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:23]:
Again, this is in the Gmail app. And on iPhone, menu, settings, email preferences, images, and the menu item is ask before displaying external images. So that will keep them from automatically loading. It's important that you set it everywhere that you read mail, okay? One device loading images, that's enough. That's all it needs to trip that pixel. And then after that, emails show a display images below link that you can click, and that's what you do when you trust the sender, or if you'd rather not have your coworker know that you opened the mail, then you would never click it there. MailSuite has a help page that talks about it as well. Remember, MailSuite is the company that makes one of the trackers and has that advice about opting out.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:11]:
Now, if you do that, newsletters, receipts, signatures, they all tend to look broken because they are also using actual images as part of the email setup. So that's the trade-off that you have, right? That's some of the stuff that you won't be able to get access to until you click show images. And so, yeah, oftentimes with a newsletter, I have to click that stupid show images option to see what is even in the image, which I think is part of why newsletters are so image heavy these days is because they know that you'll click that show images option. Gmail already blocks images again on its own for senders it thinks are suspicious. So, The show images rule can actually be toggled on by Gmail by default. What you're doing by setting the rule is saying, I just want it across the board. Now, blocking images does a lot of the work, but it doesn't stop everything because there are some things that are still part of the process there. What is still reported to the sender whenever you, uh, whenever you, even if you don't have images turned on, if you click a link? Well, yes, trackers of course reroute links through their own server first so they know that you've clicked.

Mikah Sargent [00:13:34]:
And that is part of Mailtrack as well. Um, a read receipt at work, Google Workspace and Outlook both have actual true read receipt features. Okay. Now this is only for work or school accounts. So personal gmail.com accounts don't give you that feature, but. It is something that can be toggled on for work accounts, and Gmail may ask you to approve it. Your company may automatically have it set to send automatically. You have to go in and check if that's the case.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:06]:
There's— we'll include a link in the show notes to Google's guide on requesting or returning a read receipt in it. And then in Outlook, you can also decline to send one. And, uh, if you do choose to add, there's an option to add that request in Outlook as well. So clicking a tracked link, a read receipt for work accounts, those are 2 ways that the system can still log that you have opened an email. The 3rd way, of course, is replying. If you reply to an email, then you can't really say that you didn't Open it, right? But there's one thing to bear in mind, okay? Opening an email is not the same thing as reading an email. There's a chance that you could open an email and not get around to reading it. People get distracted.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:57]:
So pixels are just guesses. A preview pane, a security scanner, even a forwarded copy of the email would still, or can still register. As an open. So someone who blocks images can read every word and then show up as unopened forever so that your coworker could on the other end go, you never opened my email. Meanwhile, you're going, well, we've talked about these 3 things that you mentioned in emails in the past 3 days. Yes, I have read your email. So those checkboxes don't technically mean read. They simply mean— A picture.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:34]:
Has loaded, not he left me on read. Ultimately though, if we're looking for a verdict here, well, I have to tell you, your coworker is right because open tracking is a real thing in Gmail. It's actually incredibly common and it's done with this secret invisible image. It's not a feature of email itself. See, Gmail of course hides where you are, but not that you opened it or when. Again, settings, See All Settings, General, Images, Ask Before Displaying External Images. That is the protection you can do, but you gotta do it on every device. And of course, link clicks and workplace read receipts are separate, and turning images off does not circumvent that feature or functionality.

Mikah Sargent [00:16:28]:
So, Lyle, thank you for taking the time to write in. I hope you're enjoying Fort Collins. I— goodness, I love that place. And I want to thank you all for taking the time to join us this week for another episode of Hands-On Tech. I want to remind you, of course, about Club Twit at twit.tv/clubtwit. Be sure to check it out. Lots of great features, uh, ad-free content and chapter markers for your shows, great club shows, access to the Discord. Join the club, have some fun, get that warm fuzzy feeling knowing you're helping to support the work we do here on the network.

Mikah Sargent [00:16:58]:
Thank you, thank you. I'll be back again next week with another episode of Hands-On Tech, but for now, it's time to say goodbye. Goodbye.