That's not how email works

I've contacted them about this multiple times and always get the same clueless & useless responses that ultimately end with "just disregard the notices" result.

What a waste of resources, at so many levels.

I work with banking data day to day and the internal systems are often just as rough. CSV exports with inconsistent date formats between the same bank's own products. Transaction descriptions that are random truncated strings with no standardisation. Every bank formats their statements differently and some of them can't even stay consistent between their own account types.

You'd think with the regulatory pressure around data accuracy this stuff would be sorted by now. But the reality is most banks treat their digital infrastructure like legacy plumbing - it works well enough that nobody wants to risk touching it.

My experience with IT in banks is that this entire "feature" of tracking who's opening/not opening emails must have went through about 50 people, and it must have taken at least a year from the idea forming in someone's head, going through all the administrative bureaucracy, getting approved, developed, tested, and rolled out.

Is it that HSBC has 0 competent people who could have mentioned that "tracking pixels are unreliable, especially in 2025/26"? Or is it that everybody who mentioned this was overruled by middle/upper management because they know better? What about the http:// part? I imagine there must have been a few developers saying we should not be serving anything under http://.

My wife continues to get spam snail mail from Citi, and they offer no way to opt out. If it was my account, I would switch banks.

Back to the main topic: I think it's pretty stupid of the HSBC IT folks to assume that an email was not read because the tracking pixels were never accessed. Lots of email clients these days do not load images by default.

This works well as a bluff, but of course you need to be ready to follow through in case they call the bluff. Which if you are, you may as well switch banks for real anyway.

If the bank wants to waste time and energy with this nonsense, that's their business. As long as nothing real bad can happen, let them at it.

I don't think I'd be inclined to do the "bank's job" when it affects me not a bit. As sure as eggs is eggs, I wouldn't spend hours on the phone or chatline explaining what their problem is. It seems like it's their problems and not the OP's.

It's fine, Capital One. I did open your emails, I just didn't load your shady tracking pixels.

But I get their emails just fine. It's their tracking that (intentionally) isn't working.

In fact, the sheer amount of systems not working correctly in Britain is astonishing. Feels like the whole country is falling apart.

> But we’re in the Darkest Timeline. Tracking pixels have become so endemic that HSBC have clearly come to the opinion that if they can’t track when I open their emails, I must not be receiving their emails. So they wrote me a letter to tell me that my emails have been “returned undelivered” (which seems to be an outright lie).

What's the point of that entire handshake then?

yes, its not how email is supposed to work. but people can be really really stupid.

mate was on a toll till this. I mean after all that amazing write-up we gon be clicking links in emails??!

The focus on http versus https in allowing surveillance of fetching the tracking pixel are all but completely irrelevant.

In any case, the domain name of the tracking pixel locations will be resolved through DNS, which is almost always unencrypted. So anyone on the LAN will see the DNS query, revealing the banking URL, in plain text.

The big issue here, which I couldn't find one comment regarding, is that the email client is interpreting HTML.

Use plain text email! Problem solved. At least use a "Simple HTML" or similar mode when viewing email. Where the HTML is rendered, but no links are followed.

  They hired another company to do it.
  The project has been over for 4 years.
  The man who determined the requirements no longer works at HSBC or the other company.
  The coder doesn't even know HSBC is using his code.

This is one of the reasons why in 2019 they wrote about their own demise https://web.archive.org/web/20240213185758/https://www.cimb.... against fintech (which is only slightly less archaic) and how cryptos, I don't know which ones, but maybe some yet to be born, will eventually displace them because regardless of their dominant position, the level of poor service and archaic systems is not humanly/socially sustainable for much longer.

Their leadership is mentally incapable of changing. Unfortunately, I fear that most of the population isn't either.

Not in my email client, mutt. I use Thunderbird once in a great while. For some reason I thought there was an option to stop that and I enabled it. Will need to check the next time I fire up Thunderbird.

Was this opening sentence necessary? It is not germane at all to the rest of the article. Ironically, it is itself virtue-signalling (for some definition of virtue), just to a different audience.

That's why I fucking hate society. This is everywhere.

But this post is entirely speculation. The author has no evidence they're basing it on tracking pixels. They're literally just guessing.

And I'm dubious that tracking pixels would be a reliable enough signal to be worth it. Doesn't Gmail download images in advance anyways? Plus, I regularly filter predictable emails or just archive them directly from my inbox based on the subject line without opening.

I'd more likely assume they have an e-mail bounce detector that just has a bug in it.