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 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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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[–] greyfox 6 points 1 month ago

It is very unlikely this has anything to do with tracking pixels. Even most graphical email clients don't load pictures by default these days, and they probably have plenty of customers that just never check their email anyways so I doubt that would be enough to shutdown an account.

This is more likely about them trying to confirm contact information to make sure your phone/physical/email address hasn't changed, and since you haven't confirmed that they are restricting your usage to prevent someone from stealing your account until they can confirm it is still you.

I would say this isn't them trying to make you dance, this is much more likely to be them trying to keep your account safe.