Email Required (digital exclusion of people without email)

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This community collects stories, cases and situations where people without email are excluded from society.

This also includes people who have an email account but:

are unwilling to share their email address with the other party (e.g. the other party uses gmail or MS)
the other party’s mail server refuses the senders mail server
the other party’s web form falsely rejects a registrant’s email address validity, perhaps due to weird constraints beyond that of email address RFCs.

Somewhat related:

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evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org

Bank froze my account because I do not trigger the tracker pixels in their email? Not sure what’s going on… (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org to c/email_required@lemmy.sdf.org

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Got an email from a bank saying my account has been put in a restricted state because they have been unable to reach me. Their emails reach me fine. They rarely send paper mail but when they do I can see that they have the correct address on file.

Then I looked closer at their email, examined the HTML, and found that they insert a tracker pixel in their messages. So if I were to use a graphical mail client with default configs, they would surreptitiously get a signal telling them my IP (thus whereabouts) and time of day every time I open my email from them. I use a text client so the tracker pixels get ignored.

Would a bank conclude from lack of tracker pixels signals that they are not reaching a customer, and then lock down their account?

I’m not going to call them and ask.. fuck them for interrupting my day and making me dance. I don’t lick boots like that. I just wonder if anyone else who does not trigger tracker pixels has encountered this situation.

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[–] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago

I don't think most do and for sure don't trust them and block them.

But they're also used to judge campaigns. You take a random, small subset of your mailing list, and a/b test by sending half one email and half a different email. The tracking pixels give you a good approximation of which gets more people to read it, and you use that headline for the rest of the list. You can also do the same thing just to generally keep an eye on what types of messages work best, etc.

But fuck them, I'm not giving up privacy I can protect.