Did you know that email marketers use a dirty little nearly invisible trick to track you and to keep tracking you?

It is called ‘Pixel Tracking’ and it is when they insert a “microscopic” pixel or image into the email code, that code is embedded into the email body and has a unique tracking code assigned to it. Now, when I say microscopic, it isn’t that small. It is normally 1 pixel by 1 pixel, but that is tiny and most people would not see it in the email. And if the email marketer is slick, they can make it transparent and then you can’t see it. But when you open the email for the very first time, that pixel is drawn and the code is sent to the server and is used to track you. Here is a black page with a 1×1 pixel white dot in the middle of it so you can see how small this actually is.

This does several things for the email marketer, with the most important being, that there is a living and breathing person on the other end of the email. If the email isn’t opened and the code isn’t tracking someone, then there is a reason to track that email address. It will also supply them with some demographics such as, what your operating system is, what date and time you opened the email, your IP address, and what type of device you are using.

Armed with this information, they can better target emails to you, hopefully sending the right one that will get you to purchase something from them.

Don’t worry there is a way to stop this from happening and that is to turn off the automatic downloading of images in your email program. Lifewire has a great article on how to do this in many popular email applications. However there is a downside of not being able to see the images and that is simply they are very dull and unappealing, but you aren’t being tracked, which is a bonus.