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A while back Gmail announced it was going to rewrite the tracking images. https://blog.mailchimp.com/how...

Yep. In business, the name of the game is fast, cheap, adequate. "Good" is often considered a luxury. That's why PHP is so popular: it's free, ubiquitous, and just about any out-of-work C programmer will find it easy to pick up.

This comment on Mailchimp's blog Ewww, You Use PHP? sums up my experience as well:

John
THANK YOU! I have heard the gripes so many times about how horrible PHP is and the snooty remarks about LAMP stacks and yet I consistently see PHP used phenomenally well in all kinds of applications I once endured a meeting that included an entourage of ASP and MS Sequel Server guys and sales people. When asked what I planning to use (prior of course to this “meeting”) the terms PHP and MySQL came up and a hardy laugh followed at my expense. I was quickly told how IIS, ASP, and MSSql are the “big brother” of prior mentioned products. Six figure dev quotes later and deciding to go it on our own, we got what we needed in place for the 3 figure quote of $100 Needless to say, I’m pleased to see you OPENLY admitting to PHP Go for it!

Unfortunately just because all your friends use Gmail, doesn't mean that Google have a monopoly.

It's a few years old (I couldn't find anything newer), but at least among users who have signed up to mailing lists with Mailchimp Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail were pretty much neck and neck in 2011.

http://blog.mailchimp.com/majo...

A good read from the folks at mailchimp: http://mailchimp.com/resources... There are a couple sections that might be of use.

Marketers will at least know that the user opened the email because the images were loaded somewhere. See MailChimp's post on the subject. This means that you can not longer look at a message even once without the marketer knowing that you did.

Way ahead of you. To sum up most of it (and some more of my own), see here at MailChimp.

Mailchimp did it too: http://blog.mailchimp.com/going-freemium-one-year-later/

I can understand why you would post this anonymously.

Personally I feel those who use /. are ahead of the rest.
If someone post a link, I feel it's going to be useful as it's already passed their acid test.

You need to read Disconnect's privacy policy http://disconnect.me/privacy
Their privacy policy includes
mailchimp.coms' http://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy

There's enough programs available now that are anonymous
PeerBlock
HOSTS file and many many more.

People who send email newsletters (not spam) that people have signed up to receive, want to have analytics data on who reads their messages. Perfectly normal, not dastardly companies that offer email marketing platforms like Constant Contact, MailChimp, CampaignMonitor, etc. all include such recipient tracking by default. Not only by noticing whether or not somebody downloads an image in an HTML email, but also by rewriting all URLs linked in the message so that individual clicks can be registered. These are all recorded uniquely to each subscriber so the sender can tell who is interested in what content. Anyone who is surprised about this is out of the loop. This kind of information is very useful for the nonprofit I work for to understand which of our opt-in subscribers are interested in what content and how we can make our emails more useful for their work.

http://www.mailchimp.com/features/reports

Or better yet, an embedded <img> tag (or something similar) that is just like what the spammers use for tracking valid email addresses. There are several companies that offer this technology to consumers. Problem is, it doesn't work if you use a mail client capable of blocking "remote" images (which is a feature even webmail providers are starting to offer.