Email marketing is a great way to drive traffic to your business and increase brand awareness, but it can also be a sneaky way for someone to spy on you and if you’re not careful, an email marketing platform can expose you to people who might not otherwise have access to your personal information, that’s why knowing who you’re exposing your emails to is so important.
What is an email tracker?
Email trackers are a feature that lets marketers see which emails are opening, which links are clicked, and which links are forwarded; the reason email tracker is useful for marketers is that they can see which emails are helping their business, and which is not, and to which customers those emails are forwarded, they can be useful to find out who is opening your emails, but they can also be intrusive, exposing all your emails to anyone who happens to be looking at your account.
Use a spam blocker to find out who’s sending you email
Using a spam blocker, you can find out which email provider is sending you emails, many spam blockers, including email providers themselves, also allow you to view which domains and IP addresses are sending you spam.
In Gmail, go to Settings -> Filters, after enabling and configuring your spam filter, look at the Spam tab and you should see all the emails you’ve received because your email provider marked them as spam, if the email address for that email is the email address for the email you’re sending, you can add the sender as a contact and then ask your email provider who is sending you emails.
Set up a whitelist to find out who’s tracking you
Email trackers are one thing, but what if someone is watching you as you walk down the street or following you with a camera; you may find out who is observing you by putting up a whitelist in your email provider and this is especially important if you’re being followed, as most email providers enable you to ban senders on the platform and to set up a whitelist, visit your email provider’s settings page.
Detect if your email is being forwarded
When someone copies an email address from your email address book or contacts and pastes it into a new email, that address now has two email addresses associated with it; this can be a sneaky way for an employer to access your business information, or for someone to intercept your email when you don’t want them to see it.
Email forwarding is typically accomplished by utilizing a tool such as Gmail’s Forward as function, pasting your email address into the To field, and checking to see if your email is being forwarded, you can tell if your email is being forwarded by looking in your Sent or All folder- if your email address is the one being forwarded, you should see an extra copy of your email with the sender’s address in the From or CC fields, depending on your email provider.
Conclusion
Email marketing is an excellent method for driving visitors to your website and increasing brand awareness, but it also has the potential to be used against you to gather information about you and your activities; make use of a platform for email marketing that doesn’t collect any extraneous information, such as a fictitious email address or website data and you shouldn’t send emails to addresses that aren’t connected to an email account that you own.
