Email Required (digital exclusion of people without email)

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This community collects stories, cases and situations where people without email are excluded from society.

This also includes people who have an email account but:

are unwilling to share their email address with the other party (e.g. the other party uses gmail or MS)
the other party’s mail server refuses the senders mail server
the other party’s web form falsely rejects a registrant’s email address validity, perhaps due to weird constraints beyond that of email address RFCs.

Somewhat related:

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Bank froze my account because I do not trigger the tracker pixels in their email? Not sure what’s going on… (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Got an email from a bank saying my account has been put in a restricted state because they have been unable to reach me. Their emails reach me fine. They rarely send paper mail but when they do I can see that they have the correct address on file.

Then I looked closer at their email, examined the HTML, and found that they insert a tracker pixel in their messages. So if I were to use a graphical mail client with default configs, they would surreptitiously get a signal telling them my IP (thus whereabouts) and time of day every time I open my email from them. I use a text client so the tracker pixels get ignored.

Would a bank conclude from lack of tracker pixels signals that they are not reaching a customer, and then lock down their account?

I’m not going to call them and ask.. fuck them for interrupting my day and making me dance. I don’t lick boots like that. I just wonder if anyone else who does not trigger tracker pixels has encountered this situation.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

I never even open emails from my credit union, the few I get.

Change banks. Move to a credit union.

I save $500/year in fees because I have multiple accounts and banks change for that.

My credit union doesn't care. Everything works the same, still have an app if I want, can do balance checks and transfers via text (and if I'm Sim-jacked, that's disabled, I've tested it).

If they see unusual transactions I'll get a text and a phone call. I then call the number I have (not the one they give me) or login via the website (which uses 2 verification mechanisms).