Please educate me on this. How do I find if it’s enabled?
>>Please educate me on this. How do I find if it’s enabled?
Depends on your email client - in my case I use outlook almost exclusively - anytime there is a tracking pixel, I get a yellow bar at the top of my email messages that says “’to protect your privacy, some pictures in this message were not downloaded”. If you see that message, and don’t click the ‘download pictures’ button, then the pixel won’t fire.
But if there are any images visible in the email you are reading, and you see those images, the tracking can work (and probably is being tracked).
It gets harder with ‘trusted senders’; once you ‘trust’ certain people, images can be made to download automatically - and the tracking does/can takes place.
Lots of scammy senders also make the emails almost useless if you don’t allow the pictures, so you often need to decide between not reading the emails at all (if they are useless without the pictures), or allowing the pictures and being tracked.
Some trackingpixels are not visible, even if you ‘download pictures’, in fact it is probably more common for them not to be visible than it is for them to be visible, but the reality is that any images that are in the email - visible or not - can track you, your ip address, your OS you are using, the email client and possibly browser (if you are using a browser based email)....its the world we live in
https://www.maketecheasier.com/how-tracking-pixels-monitor-email/
Yup, either turn off external images or don’t allow html and do plain text emails. The latter is probably the safest and the email will be readable, unlike some html emails with images blocked.
Don’t let images show in your emails.
When you have that set properly, you have to click a button or link to allow images to be seen.