How to Prevent Email Tracking & Stay Confidential Online

Yes, your emails can be tracked. This article delves into how your emails are tracked and lists out a few simple steps for safe and confidential communication.

Can someone track the emails you send?

Email is a vital form of communication today. Though instant messengers have claimed the top spot for secure and confidential real-time communication, emails are still the standard to convey official messages to your peers, colleagues, partners, customers, and other delegates. Emails contain a myriad of information right from your financial statements, the daily news, magazine, blogs and other subscriptions, promotions, offers, social media updates, and even your travel plans. That’s a lot!

So, with the amount of personal information going in and out of your emails, have you ever stopped to consider how traceable they are? Emails can be traced in a number of ways, and recognizing this early on is critical to online confidentiality. Because, only then can you identify ways to keep your personal data secure.

How Does Email Tracing Work?

Every email that you send or receive is a digital fingerprint. When you hit send on an email, it won’t directly reach the recipient’s inbox; instead, your email passes through several intermediary servers managed by the email client. This leaves a digital trail.

The most basic technique of email tracing is through email headers, which contain encoded messages — secret metadata in every message. Email timestamp, path, and the email server’s IP address are included in these headers. Your IP address can indicate your approximate location and in some cases identify your internet service provider, or even you, the sender.

Who Can Trace Your Emails?

Legal Entities

Multiple entities can trace your emails, each with distinct access and legal power. Court rulings or warrants allow law enforcement agencies to access email records from email service providers & ISPs. Many governments can force email firms to reveal sensitive user data.

Government organizations often have larger surveillance capabilities. Previous disclosures have indicated that some agencies can monitor email interactions on a broad scale.

Who else can access your data?

• Your Internet Service Provider (ISP)
• Bad actors out on the dark web
• Advertising agencies and marketers

ISPs & Email Clients

Your email data is most accessible to your Internet Service Provider and your email client.

Even though reputable firms take security and confidentiality seriously, they can nevertheless access user communications. Their access is usually limited by organizational regulations and regulatory restrictions.

Hackers

Hackers may access email accounts or intercept communications. This emphasizes the significance of solid security along with confidentiality.

Advertisers & Marketers

Even harmless advertisers can track your email habits. Promotional emails, tracking URLs, “pixel tracking” images can inform senders when you opened an email, from what device, and even your approximate location.

Confidentiality Risks You Should Know About

Email tracking poses confidentiality risks beyond surveillance.

Email tracking can create a digital profile which includes your interests, relationships, financial status, and daily habits. Marketers use this data for targeted advertising, but identity thieves and other criminals could also utilize it.

Consider a bad actor trying to scam you with social engineering or a phishing email. With your digital profile, they can identify where you are located, the email services you use, the digital assets that you hold, the wallets, banking platforms, and even exchanges that you use. Then, they extract your login data or seed phrase using fake email threats or enticing offers from exchanges. Classic phishing.

Here’s a perfect example of how profiling can be used against you based on the services that you use.

Storing your passwords and seed phrases in email or cloud can also expose them, making them vulnerable to attacks.

IP address tracking might identify your location, endangering your physical security. Journalists, activists, and anyone whose safety depends on anonymity should be cautious of exposing their IP addresses.

Professional implications can result from email tracing. Employee email accounts may be monitored, including personal messages. Personal emails may be subpoenaed in court.

Digital interactions are permanent, so the emails you send today may appear years later in unforeseen situations. In some situations or social norms, what seems innocent may be problematic.

Practical Steps to Protect Your Email Confidentiality

Here are a few ways to combat email tracing. Without having to go through any highly sophisticated technicalities, taking the simple steps outlined below can boost your email confidentiality.

• Start with confidentiality-focused email services. Many online tools offer end-to-end encryption and little data logging. While they aren’t fully immune to email tracing, these programs offer more confidentiality protections than mainstream options.
• You can also use a VPN that hides your IP address and masks your location. It also encrypts your internet connection, making it difficult to track your online activity. This is crucial when you’re using public Wi-Fi.
• Do not sign your emails using your real name or full name. Do not use an email that contains your name in it. Use a burnable email address for trivial conversations.
• Consider encrypted messaging for critical messages. Email will always have tracing difficulties, but decentralized encrypted services like BChat can improve confidentiality manifold.
• Check and change email confidentiality settings often. Most major email services include confidentiality measures to minimize data gathering and sharing. Learn and adjust these options to suit your confidentiality preferences.
• Disable automatic image loading in your email client to avoid tracking pixels. This simple adjustment prevents many types of tracking while letting you manually load photos.

BelNet: Decentralized Confidentiality for Your Emails

BelNet, the Beldex blockchain-based decentralized VPN, enhances anonymity, keeps your interactions confidential, and protects you from online threats.

• Masternodes: BelNet uses the masternodes on the Beldex network instead of centralized servers, eliminating single points of failure.
• No Centralized Server Logs: Email traffic passes through numerous masternodes, making tracking difficult.
• IP Masking: BelNet conceals your IP address to prevent email tracking. The recipient, ISP, and the email client can only see the IP address of the BelNet exit server.
• Censorship-Resistance: Since there’s no central authority managing the network, it cannot be censored. If one node is blocked, several other nodes help keep the network alive and resilient. There are over 2000 masternodes relays on BelNet.
• Open-Source: BelNet is completely open-source, transparent, free, and managed by the community.
• Split Tunnelling: With split tunneling, you can split your traffic. Route your email communications via BelNet while leaving regular browsing outside the dVPN tunnel.
• Unrestricted Access: BelNet securely bypasses email provider censorship in countries that monitor or block them.
• Confidential Ecosystem: While BelNet anonymizes traffic, BNS offers confidential Web3 identities & hosting, and BChat for secure instant-messages, creating an ecosystem built for communication confidentiality.

Conclusion

Email traceability is one of the disadvantages of public networks and unsecure email clients. If one can understand the limitations of open, unencrypted communication, then they can easily stop their personal data from being exposed to others.

A fool proof effective solution to this problem is using a dVPN like BelNet. Protect your confidentiality. Stay safe, stay confidential.

Follow Beldex on

Telegram | Twitter | Discord | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Medium | CoinMarketCap | YouTube