The DIY Superguide to Blocking Email Trackers

Get your inbox officially a-rockin', and tell email trackers not to bother knockin'.

Data is worth a mint, and unsurprisingly, there's now a very long line of companies dreaming up sly ways to get their sweaty fingers on it. One of the more recent additions to the ever-growing list of data-ruses is the "email protection service". In summary, you give a self-styled and completely unaudited "pRiVaCy BrAnD" access to your entire email flow, and they remove the trackers before sending the email to your inbox.

This would be a fantastic idea if you could actually trust tech companies. Unfortunately, however, tech companies are among the least trustworthy entities in the entire universe, and self-styled "pRiVaCy BrAnDs" are no exception. In fact, the only two things you can ever trust self-styled "pRiVaCy BrAnDs" to do are...

• Collect and exploit data.
• Pretend that they don't.

It's therefore most unwise to use "email protection" services. You're allowing a totally unnecessary and totally opaque third-party unrestricted access to your mail stream. And if the "protection" service is free, the only thing the service provider can possibly monetise is your data.

But don't worry. Blocking email trackers on your own device, without releasing your email flow to any third party, is fast, simple and reliable.

Tutanota DDoS: Should We Keep Faith With The Privacy-Protected Email Concept?

"I think we should expect true privacy resources to encounter problems, and to encompass some inconvenience - because that's how real privacy commitment rolls."

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

After a sustained bout of disruptive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on the encrypted email provider Tutanota last week, questions are being asked about the reliability of such services. Although there's little doubt about the trust factor of the privacy-committed email services themselves, any interruption to access is a concern. So even if the access interruptions are the doing of malicious third parties, they can still damage a service's aura of reliability, and thus its trustworthiness.

WHY DO PRIVACY-PROTECTING EMAIL SERVICES SUFFER DDOS ATTACKS?

Tutanota is not the only private email service to have suffered persistent DDoS attacks. ProtonMail has also been subjected to two such successful assault campaigns, dating back to 2015, and 2018.

So why are these services targeted? Are the authorities trying to take them down in order to stop secret, subversive messaging? Is Silicon Valley organising against them because it fears losing its grip on the data-mining gravy train?