There are many problems with those so called tracking bugs First of all, most email clients won't load remote content unless told to do so by the user (which is a per-message thing). Basically, you are 20 years too late.

Secondly, spam filters look out for exactly those things and are very likely to flag your message as spam when they detect a remotely loaded 1 pixel image. In the course of mail processing and spam filtering, the mail system may already load the image (either for checking or for embedding in the message).

Last but not least: Tracking bugs probably violate various privacy laws all around the world. The EU has the GDPR, and the UK has replaced that (after Brexit) with it's own version "UK-GDPR" (pretty much a word-for-word copy AFAIK). As you stated, you want to track user behaviour. This requires explicit consent by the end user!

A GDPR violation can get expensive. I am not a lawyer, but this is what i can see:

A user can state non-material damages (suffered stress due to your privacy violation or something similar) and claim compensation. GDPR Article 82 subsection 1:

Any person who has suffered material or non-material damage as a resul
+t 
of an infringement of this Regulation shall have the right to receive 
compensation from the controller or processor for the damage suffered.

[download]

Tracking a user seems to (at least) violate the spirit of Article 25 "Data protection by design and default" of the GDPR, since there is no technical requirement to track the delivery of an email and no reasonable user expectation that the reading status of emails are tracked. Also, you need the other infrastructure in place to deal with data protection and handling of user requests pertaining to the GDPR (deletion requests, information requests, etc).

Violating GDPR can result in administrative fines, see Article 83 subsection 4:

Infringements of the following provisions shall, in accordance with pa
+ragraph 2, 
be subject to administrative fines up to 10 000 000 EUR, or in the cas
+e of an 
undertaking, up to 2 % of the total worldwide annual turnover of the p
+receding
financial year, whichever is higher:

(a) the obligations of the controller and the processor pursuant to Ar
+ticles 8, 11, 25 to 39 and 42 and 43;

(b) the obligations of the certification body pursuant to Articles 42 
+and 43;

(c) the obligations of the monitoring body pursuant to Article 41(4).

[download]

So technically, you could possibly get fined 10 million Euros (or more, depending on the financial success of your company) for adding a tracking mechanism to your outgoing email. Ooof, that doesn't sound like a project worth pursuing.

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In reply to Re: Create email tracking image by cavac
in thread Create email tracking image by Bod

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