How to Avoid Image Tracking in Gmail and Outlook

Email is a service widely used by both private users and companies. We have at our disposal a wide variety of options that can be part of our day to day. However, it must also be noted that it is a source of entry for threats and that our privacy is not always present. In this article we are going to explain what we have to do to avoid trackers in both Gmail and Outlook .

Protect our e-mail, very important

As we say, email can be the source of entry for malware and privacy issues. We already know that personal information has great value on the web. We can be victims of very diverse threats that can collect personal data to later include us in spam lists, send targeted advertising or even sell it to a third party.

Avoid Image Tracking in Gmail and Outlook

Therefore, we must take into account the importance of correctly protecting our e-mail . The aim is to prevent our information from being used, from entering the account or from infecting our computers.

Something fundamental is the fact of avoiding being tracked . However, it is a reality that nowadays it is quite common to follow up via email. We will explain how to avoid it.

We are going to focus on Gmail and Outlook as they are the most used email providers in Spain. They have millions of users in our country.

How to avoid tracking in Gmail

One of the methods you can use to track us through Gmail is through images . These small images could collect information from users. However, we can avoid it in a simple and fast way.

The first thing we have to do is click on the Settings icon, which is at the top right, and we access See all settings . Once in here, in the General tab, we go down to Images .

We will see that by default the option to Always show external images will be marked. However, what interests us is to change to Ask before showing external images .

Evitar el rastreo de imágenes en Gmail

When we have this option marked, we just have to press save. From that moment on, images will no longer be automatically uploaded when we open an email and they will not be able to track us. However, keep in mind that this also disables Gmail’s dynamic email.

How to avoid tracking in Outlook

We can do something similar is Outlook , another of the most used email providers in Spain. We can prevent you from tracking us and putting our privacy at risk when using your platform.

In this case we have to go to Settings (top right), enter General and go to Privacy and data . There we will find the images section, where we must mark the option of Do not use the Outlook service to load the images.

Evitar el rastreo de imágenes en Outlook

When we have done this we will simply have to save the changes. From that moment, the images will not be loaded automatically in an email that we receive in Outlook. One way to avoid tracking.

External extensions to avoid tracking in e-mail

We have seen how to avoid being tracked when using email services such as Gmail and Outlook. For this we can configure the way in which images are loaded automatically when receiving an e-mail. However we can also use external tools.

For the main browsers such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox we have a wide range of possibilities to install add-ons of all kinds. Many of them can also help to improve the privacy and security of users.

One of the extensions that we can use is Ugly Email . It is available for both Chrome and Firefox . Their mission is basically to prevent us from being tracked through email. To do this, it displays alerts.

But this is by no means the only extension we can use. Another is PixelBlock , which has a similar function to what we mentioned above to configure in Gmail and Outlook.