Inbox full of promo emails? 80% are tracking you, new report warns

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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• 50 major US retailers sent 42B marketing emails in 28 days.
• 80% used tracking pixels to monitor clicks, devices, and location.
• Proton Mail calls the tactics “an engineered assault on privacy.”

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A new Proton Mail report has found that retailers across the US are using every trick in the book to grab your attention over the holiday period — and some of their practices are invading your privacy.

Proton Mail’s Spam Watch

According to Proton Mail’s new research, “Spam Watch: The US Inbox Overload + Hidden Tracker Report,” 80% of US retailers now embed tracking technology in their marketing emails.

Using a controlled Proton Mail inbox, the team captured every email sent by the largest US retailers (with physical locations) from Nov. 4 to Dec. 1. Each marketing email was linked to its timestamp, sender, subject line, and any embedded tracking links or pixels. The emails were then collated with public data on customer volume, including loyalty membership counts and benchmarks.

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This timeframe not only included standard, normal weeks, but also what Proton Mail calls “the surge” — Black Friday, taking place on 28 November, through Cyber Monday, on Dec. 1.

Based on this analysis, these companies send roughly 1.3 billion marketing emails per day during a standard week. During the shopping event and promotional period, however, this almost doubled, with around 2.55 billion emails sent day-to-day.

So, billions of emails are landing in our inboxes on a daily basis. Now consider how often we are tracked when we click any of these messages, since 80% of these retailers include tracking pixels.

These small, invisible images, as well as tracker links, are able to log information on our location, the time an email is opened, and our device type, all of which help retailers build a profile on us and potentially our shopping habits.

As Proton Mail calls it, these practices “turn the simple act of opening an email into a data collection event.”

Underhanded tactics

The number of trackers found in marketing emails ranged from none to 16, of which the worst offenders were CB2, VS Pink, and Victoria’s Secret.

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The top ten offenders with high email and tracker volumes were:

• CB2: Score: 27.39 (13.00 trackers per email × 2.11 emails per day)
• Anthropologie: Score: 24.31 (12.90 trackers per email × 1.88 emails per day)
• Victoria’s Secret: Score: 21.75 (13.84 trackers per email × 1.57 emails per day)
• VS Pink: Score: 16.00 (14.00 trackers per email× 1.14 emails per day)
• Crate & Barrel: Score: 15.71 (7.86 trackers per email × 2.00 emails per day)
• Kate Spade: Score: 12.00 (5.51 trackers per email × 2.18 emails per day)
• Pottery Barn: Score: 11.25 (5.00 trackers per email × 2.25 emails per day)
• DICK’S Sporting Goods: Score: 9.82 (3.31 trackers per email × 2.96 emails per day)
• Lowe’s: Score: 9.73 (4.42 trackers per email × 2.20 emails per day)
• Urban Outfitters: Score: 9.00 (4.00 trackers per email × 2.25 emails der day)

Other notable email-flooding and tracker-happy US retailers included J. Crew, Aerie, Ulta Beauty, Nordstrom, and JCPenney.

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The volume of emails a company sends, while annoying, does not always correlate with the heavy-handed use of trackers. Proton Mail also ranked the organizations most likely to use trackers, dubbed the “silent stalkers.” These retailers may send fewer emails, but according to Proton Mail, they “aggressively mine data from each interaction.”

The ten “silent stalkers” are:

• VS Pink: 14.00 trackers per email
• Victoria’s Secret: 13.84 trackers per email
• CB2: 13.00 trackers per email
• Anthropologie: 12.90 trackers per email
• Ulta Beauty: 12.00 trackers per email
• Aerie: 9.00 trackers per email
• J. Crew: 8.50 trackers per email
• Crate & Barrel: 7.86 trackers per email
• REI: 6.83 trackers per email
• Kate Spade: 5.51 trackers per email

The report also highlights the “100% Club,” which includes 40 out of the 50 brands audited, in which at least one tracker was found in every email they sent to customers. In other words, for 8 out of 10 major US retailers, “tracking is not an optional tactic; it is a hardcoded default.”

“The Spam Watch findings confirm a harsh reality: the inbox has become a high-volume, high-noise channel where brands battle for attention while silently gathering data on every open,” commented Anant Vijay Singh, Head of Product at Proton Mail. “This is not accidental — it is an engineered assault on your attention and your privacy.”

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While the report has highlighted retailers going overboard with customer profiling and tracking, it doesn’t mean that every audited company has opted to treat its clients in this way. In total, six retailers that sent marketing emails during this timeframe decided not to use spy pixels or trackers at all. These companies are Bass Pro Shops, Burlington, Dillard’s, H&M, New Balance, and TJ Maxx.

Reduce spam in your inbox

Now that email is used as a primary source of communication, it can be incredibly frustrating to open up your inbox and see that retailers have flooded it with promotions and subject lines screaming for your attention. Not only is this incredibly annoying, but it can also mean that you miss important announcements or messages caught in a shopping tsunami.

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However, there are some steps you can take to reduce the spam in your inbox — and this can be of benefit to your privacy, too.

My first piece of advice is to separate your online shopping habits and accounts from your main email account. I do this by dedicating an email address purely for use with online shops, which drastically reduces the volume of promotional emails I receive. I also have another email account that I use if I want to access a website, but I don’t want to hand over my “true” email address.

If you have the time, you could also go through the process of unsubscribing to marketing emails, but this can be a time-consuming process — and so it might just be quicker to use a secondary email address and then only click on messages related to your orders.