All of us who use the Web are aware of privacy issues. Not only do cookies track our every move while we surf the Net, there’s another way of monitoring your movements – email tracking. Not many would know that tracking your email includes many methods. An example would be monitoring whether the intended recipient has opened the email or not. Email tracking gives away a host of additional information, for instance if a particular link was accessed, & so on.

Although many email service providers do give you inbuilt safety measures, sometimes those may not be enough. Users may have also not set their Privacy Settings correctly. All of which is likely to give away valuable information to 3rd parties like your IP address or operating system version.

There’s now a free service. Email Privacy Tester, that may be used to send a specially prepared test email to an email address that you enter on the service’s web page. This will help you understand what info your email is leaking to others,after which you may take corrective action.

Developed by English Web developer Mike Cardwell, this service is free to use.

Once you have keyed in your email address, a mail is sent out to it by Email Privacy Tester. All that a user now has to do is to open it on the service website or an email client. Once he/she has done that, they should check back on the Website of the service as it will highlight any tests that have been triggered by that. Simple enough.

Mike writes on his blog: I built this website from scratch and host it myself, using: Debian GNU Linux, MySQL, Nginx, SQLite, Perl, MemCached, XSLT, XML, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I designed the appearance and edited everything by hand using Vi……

……For spam/virus filtering, I have built SpamAssassin and ClamAV solutions several times in the past. I am familiar with writing custom rulesets for both. I was the first person to identify, report and write about a serious bug in SpamAssassin which began on January 1, 2010.

Image Credit: Mike Cardwell

Advertising Message