That's not how email works

https://danq.me/2026/01/28/hsbc-dont-understand-email/

by HotGarbage • 6 months ago

325 146 6 months ago

danq.me

renewiltord2• 6 months ago

Tracking pixels don’t even work with Gmail because Google fetches them out of band. It doesn’t reveal open rates.

philipwhiuk2• 6 months ago

What do you mean by 'fetches them out of band'?

CGMthrowaway3• 6 months ago

It downloads them and stores in serverside cache before you ever open the email

CGMthrowaway3• 6 months ago

Same with Apple Mail

mike-cardwell2• 6 months ago

Apple's system doesn't work. At least not for everyone. https://www.grepular.com/Apples_Protect_Mail_Activity_Doesnt...

wrs• 6 months ago

They do work for the inferred purpose here though, assuming Gmail only downloads them when the email is successfully delivered to the mailbox (and thus the address is valid).

extraduder_ire4• 6 months ago

IIRC, google limits their opening of remote images if they're unique per email or from less reputable sources.

They also send you an email back saying your email wasn't delivered after a few days or hours, so there's little benefit in using the tracking pixel to determine if an address exists.

Don't know if they fetch images from emails sent to non-existent addresses, but I would if I were to design such a system.

Almondsetat• 6 months ago

I mean, they still work in some way. If you use tracking pixels to see if an email was read, I agree with you that this break the functionality. But if you just want to see if the email exists, then the fact that google fetches them (and triggers the parametric URL) still tells you something

bummy_commenter• 6 months ago

It would be better if google also fetched tracking pixels in emails sent to addresses that do not exist.

renewiltord2• 6 months ago

So, why use a tracking pixel for that? Just send an email. e.g.

    $ head -n 100 /dev/random | md5sum
    a6cc1b7c09ccb122cb066c89e16b3140  -

And that yields an instantaneous error message https://i.imgur.com/twHhIU3.png that reads "Address not found. Your message to a6cc1b7c09ccb122cb066c89e16b3140@gmail.com was not delivered because the address could not be found".

gweinberg• 6 months ago

True, but HSBC thinks you read the email, because somebody fetched the tracking pixel, right? The irony is that HSBC and others who use this kind of thing probably aren't in the least interested in when or how many times you open the email. Whoever came up with this idea (probably) really did think it was (just) a pretty good way of figuring out if they have your correct email.

jldugger• 6 months ago

Gmail because Google fetches them out of band. It doesn’t reveal open rates.

"Our open rates have skyrocketed! send more emails!"

loloquwowndueo4• 6 months ago

Want them to really listen to you? Cancel your accounts - move to another bank.

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.

direwolf205• 6 months ago

Cancelling costs them no money — banks these days don't make money on customer accounts.

loloquwowndueo4• 6 months ago

Maybe. But I still have to find a bank where you say you’re leaving and they say “oh ok, here’s your account balance, there’s the door”.

The main thing is that they do care about retention.

tadfisher2• 6 months ago

On the face of it, this is not true; net interest margin is still the main profit driver, followed by fees. But besides that, retail deposit customers are a conversion funnel for more lucrative financial products such as credit cards and personal loans.

And besides that, banks need capital reserves in the form of customer deposits; if too much money flows out then they will have to either acquire customers or pause their real moneymaking activity (loans).

Your account doesn't make them significant money. Retail banking in general makes boatloads of money, and deposits are central to this now that we're out of zero-interest-rate-land.

malfist2• 6 months ago

If banks didn't make money on customer accounts they wouldn't offer customer accounts.

pfortuny• 6 months ago

As long as they keep other people’s money, they make money on it.

JumpCrisscross2• 6 months ago

Want them to really listen to you? Cancel your accounts

Just loop in your regulators. This costs them far more and properly documents the problem for follow-up in case it becomes a pattern. Possibly more annoying than moving accounts. But far more effective (unless you have nine figures with the firm).

loloquwowndueo4• 6 months ago

Happy to hear you live in a place where regulators are effective - at least when it comes to consumer complaints.

fy20• 6 months ago

HSBC closes legitimate accounts on their own, you don't need to do anything.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/sep/03/hsbc-heads-...

My business (which had been around for 5 years at this point) was part of this. Now I'm wise Wise.

sparrish• 6 months ago

I've heard CapitalOne does the same thing... send paper mail saying their emails aren't being read.

nickname-derail• 6 months ago

NAB Australia does exactly the same thing. Unless I "load remote images" when I receive their emails, they'll start mailing letters saying that they switched me to paper statements as their emails are not going through. It also took me a bit to investigate as their emails were obviously coming through.

awesome_dude2• 6 months ago

I'm in two minds on this - the bank does need to know that its communications are being received

But, they have no idea if the paper statements are making it to your desk, or if they are getting swiped from the letterbox (I'm in an apartment in Melbourne, and the snail mail is not reliable at all, mail is sometimes delivered to the wrong building, sometimes the wrong address entirely, it's also swiped by miscreants who have nothing better to do, and, in some cases, the pricks set the letter boxes on fire, taking all the mail with it)

ryandrake• 6 months ago

If the bank really needed to know that its communications are being received, they would send them in a way that would reliably return this information (signature-confirmed postal mail). It's very unlikely that the bank actually needs to know this information.

rendaw• 6 months ago

CapitalOne balance alerts for a low-use credit card - they silently disabled the alerts because "I wasn't reading them". Because I have read notifications disabled and don't load remote resources.

Even if they truly believed I wasn't reading them, disabling them makes no sense to me. They certainly weren't bouncing and I wasn't reporting them as spam.

I dropped CapitalOne after that (not sure I moved to something better though...)

pabs3• 6 months ago

If NAB has an option to turn on plain text emails, that might help, since they obviously can't do tracking that way.

Analemma_2• 6 months ago

I have a credit card with HSBC: you know, the bank with virtue-signalling multiculturalism in their ads.

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.

bstsb• 6 months ago

precisely this. it sort of put me off an otherwise excellent article

throwaway902984• 6 months ago

My first instinct was to close the article as I didn't want to read a Republican virtue signaling to his audience. I wonder if they were trying to sound Republican?

The article itself is a nice, well interesting, dive into the topic; kinda unfortunate.

dwedge2• 6 months ago

I didn't want to read a Republican virtue signaling to his audience. I wonder if they were trying to sound Republican?

It would be very surprising behaviour for a British guy living in the UK

1over137• 6 months ago

"Republican"?! US defaultism strikes again. He's in the UK, and he states his pronouns here https://danq.me/about/ so doesn't sound very "Republican" to me.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 6 months ago

I've seen this sentiment on the left. I think the author just phrased it a little oddly.

Sometimes called "pink capitalism" or "rainbow capitalism", where a company will show the rainbow pride flag for Pride Month, but not put any more substantial effort towards diversity, plurality, LGBTQ rights, etc.

I expect nothing from companies, and it's nice to see that virtue signal. If they're signalling, it means they think we haven't been exterminated yet. But I don't expect good works from anything for-profit. It's just business.

Edit: The author using the phrase "surveillance capitalism" is generally a left wing thing. I don't hear right-wingers rallying against capitalism (let's not even get into the weeds of defining "capitalism" the word) even when they happen to oppose surveillance

apublicfrog• 6 months ago

Funny, the tone sounded UK/Australian to me. Just be aware, beyond a surface level awareness there are very few people who know what a specific ideology in your country sounds like, or care enough to learn.

direwolf205• 6 months ago

I think this kind of virtue signalling has become known as "vice signalling".

Putting diverse races in an ad, while not doing anything else about diversity, is virtue signalling. Complaining there are other races in the ad is vice signalling.

enlightens• 6 months ago

I took the use of "virtue signalling" to be an intentional jab at HSBC given everything

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#Controversies

Analemma_2• 6 months ago

If that's true it only makes the opening sentence worse: of all the things you could have accused HSBC of in your opener (laundering money for dictators and violent drug cartels, manipulating markets to fleece people out of billions, and on and on), you decided their most noteworthy sin was multicultural ads?

rjsw• 6 months ago

People used to bank with Barclays to register their support for Apartheid in South Africa.

arduanika• 6 months ago

Not only a distraction, but also fails to distinguish HSBC from pretty much any other bank, so the "the" comes off as crankish and aggrieved.

swiftcoder• 6 months ago

just to a different audience

And apparently not targeted all that well, since half the comments here think it is a right-wing (anti-multiculturalism) sentiment, and the other half a left-wing (anti-corporate-reputation-laundering) sentiment.

CodesInChaos• 6 months ago

It doesn't even link to an ad, it links to a weird parody attempt of the ad on the same site as the article. Which makes little sense for people unfamiliar with the original ad it parodies.

SilverElfin• 6 months ago

Some may treat these as an inconvenience or annoyance, but I think it’s a sign of rot. And it may run a lot deeper. Unfortunately I feel like most financial institutions have terrible websites and practices in general, so I don’t know if switching will let you avoid problems.

CGMthrowaway3• 6 months ago

Email is not a core competency of banks. They are actually pretty good at snail mail though.

reaperducer3• 6 months ago

An extra century or two of experience will do that!

barbazoo3• 6 months ago

The rot goes deeper because for every story like this there were hundreds of people involved in making it happen. Some by choice, some less so but rot nontheless.

zzyzxd• 6 months ago

Capital One does this to me as well, but at least they make it clear so I actually understanding what they mean ("You haven't opened an email from us lately...").

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

burnte• 6 months ago

Ditto, I get them all the time and just ignore them. I actually have a gmail rule that if it sees that phrase it marks it read and deletes it. Them not knowing if I read an email is not a problem I need to solve.

63stack• 6 months ago

So what do you think, what's happening here?

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://.

raverbashing• 6 months ago

I think people are overthinking this, though the discussion about reliability is merited

For every HN technically inclined people you have dozens of other customers who will give any email (thinking it's just writing "John.smith@bt.co.uk" or something) - or worse- and they have to find a way of identifying those customers

dwedge2• 6 months ago

At least they email him and don't send the stupid "you have an important message, login to see it" email. No idea what those important messages are, I'm sure sometimes they were important

dmd• 6 months ago

"hello we are your bank"

jandrese• 6 months ago

CRITICAL MESSAGE -- READ IMMEDIATELY

The automatic payment you set up has processed successfully.

malfist2• 6 months ago

I ran a team at FAANG where I supported people creating content, including emails, and no matter how many times I explained open tracking was only useful as a trend and not an individual evaluation it just went over people's heads.

Senior leadership wouldn't believe me, kept harassing my team to explain why so and so who said they opened the email didn't have an open event, and why so and so who said they didn't open the email did have an open event.

Authors wouldn't believe me because email open was the highest scoring metric they had. Less than 3% of recipients would land on the page for the publication, but >50% would "open" the email that has a teaser and a call to action to open the webpage. If they had to go off of the click through metrics which are accurate it'd make it sound like they were bad at their job.

So everyone used open rates because it made them feel good. Either that they were writing engaging content, or made them feel like they actually had a handle on who was/was not reading their mail.

No metric would have been better than this metric.

jrs2352• 6 months ago

why so and so who said they didn't open the email did have an open event

This was one of the first known issues when Gmail and others began checking and preloading images/content in emails. It was "triggering" that events/requests to tracking pixels. Eventually folks learned and knew to check the user agent to determine if it was just the mail provider preloading/checking the email content.

estimator7292• 6 months ago

At the last startup I worked at, CEO grabbed me just happening to pass by his office to proudly show me how many people at Apple had "opened" his newsletter.

I explained what that number actually means and watched his eyes totally glaze over. Doesn't matter. The "Apple number" was greater than zero so clearly he was successful at his job. (Entirely unrelated, he now has one employee and zero customers)

yobbo• 6 months ago

Email-marketing tools present these numbers as if they were ground truth.

Arguing with non-tech users means you are challenging the legitimacy of their tool, and they typically can't let go of faith in the tool. It's like Trueman trying to convince the actors that everything is somehow fake. There's no "script" for that.

antonvs• 6 months ago

Is it that HSBC has 0 competent people who could have ...

In the chain of command for a feature like this, that's quite possible.

Or is it that everybody who mentioned this was overruled by middle/upper management because they know better?

Or just learned helplessness, they don't bother because they know it's not worth trying.

stackskipton2• 6 months ago

They might have competent people but most tech people working at a bank like are out of fucks to give.

At these massive, unable to go bankrupt companies, you quickly lose all fucks to give. No one cares about opinion of ICs or even direct managers, Senior Management makes the calls and you either execute quietly or replaced with someone who is. When I worked for $MegaUSBank, there was two types of people. Those who realized their "spark" was draining out of them and got a new job after a few years and those who were just "Whatever, I push buttons and get paycheck." and had been there for 15 years.

pavel_lishin• 6 months ago

This isn't exclusive to megabanks, either.

m463• 6 months ago

I think of the term "state of the practice"

Same thing happens with renting apartments. Slowly but surely, conveniences like apartment-phone-app (to open doors, to access mailboxes) get accepted by people and then they "throw the switch" and make the remaining 3% do it. Or maybe new renters must accept it to move in. And then they can deny access to apartments imeediately, track their residents, match with online activity and more...

wat10000• 6 months ago

I'd guess one of two things. One is a conversation that goes like:

"I want to send letters to everyone who doesn't open our emails."

"We can't really detect that. We could add a tracking pixel, but–"

"Yeah, do that, the tracking pickle thing."

The other is that the "did they open this?" feature was rolled out purely for metrics knowing that it's imprecise, and later on got repurposed for something unsuitable without looking at how the "did this email get opened?" facility actually worked.

rkomorn• 6 months ago

I would definitely open my mail if it came with a tracking pickle.

brendoelfrendo• 6 months ago

My take: someone wanted a technical solution for what is a people/process problem. A hypothetical version of events, just one of many possible scenarios of course: 1) Important communications required by law and/or regulation are sent by email. 2) Contacting customers via email is sometimes unreliable. It is unreliable enough that problems caused by missed emails caused enough pain in some exec's silo that they demanded a solution. 3) "Make sure people read their email" isn't really an actionable demand. The business knows this, so they turned to IT. 4) "Make sure people read their email" isn't really technically feasible either, but at this point it's not about making sure that the customer got the message: it's about making sure that the company is covered if a customer complains about missing communications. 5) To that end, a variety of technical solutions are proposed, and everyone knows that they're all bad or incomplete. The tracking pixel is chosen because it's at the intersection of "least bad" and "lowest effort to implement." 6) Around now, someone probably pointed out the issue with serving the content over http, but changing that requires buy-in from another team. It'll go to their product manager as an inject and maybe get prioritized for next PI (it won't, something more important will come up between now and then). 7) The tracking pixel ships. The team that implemented it stresses that this is an incomplete solution and the business really needs to re-evaluate their processes around customer communications. 8) The email tracking pixel solution gets a bullet point on a slide in a presentation given to managers 3-5 levels higher than the devs who made it. No one mentions that the solution is incomplete and requires additional work and investment. No one ever thinks of it again.

Nextgrid• 6 months ago

Is it that HSBC has 0 competent people who could have mentioned

Given the salaries, tooling and working conditions for tech people in such companies, why would anyone competent work there?

blackhaz• 6 months ago

Can somebody please tell Barclays their 3DS widget is never redirecting back to the seller when transaction has been approved on user's device?

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

sd92• 6 months ago

Counterpoint: gov.uk is widely regarded as one of the best government websites in the world

nomel• 6 months ago

I'm always curious how much these sorts of things costs each citizen, per year, from a more wholistic view?

bennyp101• 6 months ago

I noticed this a couple of years ago too, I just ignored the letters, continued to receive the emails, and they stopped sending me letters about it /shrug

MagicMoonlight• 6 months ago

Who still banks with HSBC when we have Monzo and Starling?

reaperducer3• 6 months ago

Adults.

shaftway• 6 months ago

People who remember Yotta and Juno.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapse_Financial_Technologies

bmenrigh• 6 months ago

Charles Schwab has something very similar. They keep unenrolling me from their paperless thing and then send me a letter every month telling me they unenrolled me because emails aren't being delivered.

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

fooqux• 6 months ago

Capital One is the same. I eventually stopped caring; I know these paper mailings are costing them money. Maybe they'll get the point someday.

WorldMaker2• 6 months ago

An issue is the number of banks now charging you back for paper services. At least one of my banks the fee is now $15/month for paper statements. That's way more than postage.

I'd almost prefer paper statements from a few of my accounts, but not enough to pay for it directly.

6ak74rfy• 6 months ago

Maybe this is what's happening to me at Fidelity. They keep complaining about my email on custom domain but the Protonmail address works fine. I use different apps for the two because PM doesn't support IMAP, so maybe PM doesn't block the tracking pixels but the other one does.

Dwedit• 6 months ago

Gmail automatically downloads images ahead of time, so the tracking pixels will have been fetched by Gmail themselves regardless of when the user opens the email.

ChicagoBoy11• 6 months ago

I had a demo for some high-school students for an ethics and tech class that successfully demonstrated these with a GMail account, so when this started happening I got very upset lol.

jdhawk• 6 months ago

So does Apple's Mail Client. So do most webmail providers. Open signals are generally worthless.

mike-cardwell2• 6 months ago

You might want to read https://www.grepular.com/Apples_Protect_Mail_Activity_Doesnt...

extraduder_ire4• 6 months ago

I think gmail adds some heuristics on top of it, like if the same image was included in emails to multiple people.

At least that's what I remember from them announcing the feature. No idea about other providers, and I haven't tested the feature myself.

danaris• 6 months ago

With a proper personalized tracking pixel, a simple deduplication won't catch it—the whole point is that each email's tracking pixel has a unique URL that lets them know that you opened the email.

It is, of course, very possible that Google has heuristics that can catch tracking pixels—in fact, I would go so far as to say that if they chose to, they 100% could, probably tomorrow. But given where Google makes its money, I would not in the least trust them to do that for me.

jiveturkey• 6 months ago

When Gmail downloads the image it identifies itself as GoogleImageProxy, and will be coming from a GCP/Google ASN.

Similar signal will be there for any email provider or server-side filter that downloads the content for malware inspection.

Pixel trackers are nearly never implemented in-house, because it's basically impossible for you to do your own email. So the tracker is a function of the batteries-included sending email provider. Those guys do that for a living, so they are sophisticated, and filter on the provider download of images.

barbazoo3• 6 months ago

But it gets worse. Because HSBC are using http://, rather than https:// URLs for their tracking pixels, they’re also saying that every time you read an email from them, they’d like everybody on the same network as you to be able to know that you did so, too. If you’re at my house, on my WiFi, and you open an email from HSBC, not only might HSBC know about it, but I might know about it too.
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).

reaperducer3• 6 months ago

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”

Tracking pixels are the key of thing that my computer filters out. So I wonder if this explains why I get paper statements for my Apple Card.

Each time one comes in the mail, it has a letter with it stating that Goldman Sachs was unable to contact me at the email address on file, which they show as my Apple ID email address. Which works fine for everyone else in the world, including Apple.

barbazoo3• 6 months ago

The German bank I have an account with solves this by making the statements available online and considering them delivered if the statements were downloaded. I’m assuming this proper way is too expensive for some banks.

jmclnx• 6 months ago

used to surreptitiously track when somebody reads an email

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.

esskay• 6 months ago

All sounds about right for HSBC. They've got some of the worst banking tech in existence. How the heck anyone puts up with their crap is beyond me, I moved away a decade ago but still have a close family member with them and they're forever having issues (genuinely not user error) with the crippled online banking app they've got that looks like something from the early days of app development.

crazygringo3• 6 months ago

I don't see anything wrong with attempting this. A significant number of people mistype/change their e-mail address, and security messages from banks can be important, so anything that catches no-longer-working e-mail addresses is better for everyone involved. And I assume a very small proportion of people try to disable tracking pixels.

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.

jmholla• 6 months ago

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

They literally admit to this and go on to provide the evidence for their guess:

I think I can place a solid guess about what went wrong here.

crazygringo3• 6 months ago

I know they admit it. I'm just pointing it out, since many of the comments here seem to be taking it as truth.

And they don't provide any evidence. Not a single piece. Merely claiming it's a "solid guess" doesn't make it solid. It's based on nothing. Tracking pixels are extremely common, so there's nothing to suggest it's tied specifically to this. As opposed to, like I said, a buggy bounce detector.

stronglikedan• 6 months ago

I don't see anything wrong with attempting this.

I do, when the result of that attempt is to tell people to change their email addresses unnecessarily. Most people will fall for that.

crazygringo3• 6 months ago

I think most people will just think it's weird and ignore it?

The wording could obviously be better, it should use softer language with a note that if you're sure the email is correct then you can ignore the letter.

But the general concept of trying to detect unused email addresses seems valid.

koakuma-chan• 6 months ago

I can understand your frustration, but if the bank has sent the letter, you will have to update the e-mail address.

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

drdec• 6 months ago

I would have asked, "or what?"

Batman8675309• 6 months ago

Indeed. What would they do if he refused? Would they cancel his account over tracking pixels?

kylehotchkiss• 6 months ago

HSBC, truly the pinnacle of Great Banks. Surprised they haven't earned your breakup yet.

hrimfaxi• 6 months ago

The same exact thing would happen to me with interactive brokers.

kkfx• 6 months ago

Banks have some of the worst IT in the world. Being purely manager-led, with developers completely subservient to the bean counters, the results are terrible.

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.

almosthere• 6 months ago

This isn't going to get to someone at HSBC. Nothing will change.

  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.

It's absolutely useless - humans going into the age of software. It's a death spiral of I don't know's for a hundred miles.

anonymousiam• 6 months ago

Years ago, I used to get marketing spam emails from Bank of America. In their email, they did not offer a way to opt out from those types of email, so I invalidated the unique email address that I had created just for them. A few months later, I got a snail mail letter like the one Dan got, telling me that emails were being rejected and that I needed to correct my email address. I went through the same sort of nonsensical dialog with them, and they simply would not let me opt out from their marketing emails, so I left it disabled for a few years. Eventually they offered "email preferences", so I re-enabled it.

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.

adastra222• 6 months ago

“We need to confirm you are receiving our emails, please click this link” is a phishing setup. That is absolutely not what they should do.

crabmusket• 6 months ago

Agreed. What would be a good way for a bank to do this? What about "reply to this email"?

adastra222• 6 months ago

Send a verification code on login.

WorldMaker2• 6 months ago

"Reply to this email" might not be a bad idea for some basic "making an explicit action" check.

Arguably if the question is mail delivery, email already has a complex system of delivery failure reporting. Just trust that, like email programs have been doing since email was invented? "No failure is a success," doesn't have an explicit acknowledgement action from a user, but it is still a meaningful criteria.

NoGravitas2• 6 months ago

Tell them "Log in to your online banking" with no link, show an alert about the email problem when they do.

dpoloncsak• 6 months ago

Isn't this the exact reason we 'verify email address'?

What's the point of that entire handshake then?

jrs2352• 6 months ago

Using tracking pixels in emails is like using AI to generate solutions/code. It is not deterministic, is is only probabilistic.

mmmlinux• 6 months ago

Id be willing to bet the number of people who sign up for ebilling, then screw up their email address is huge. then those people blame the bank for not contacting them to tell them the issue.

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

johnea• 6 months ago

It seems the article and most of the comments here are nonsense.

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.

treetalker• 6 months ago

Who has two thumbs and (1) will never open an HSBC account because of this and (2) will advise his legal clients to bank elsewhere?

fragmede• 6 months ago

What do you tell your illegal clients them?

extraduder_ire4• 6 months ago

Based on their history, HSBC. Obviously.

bdangubic• 6 months ago

We need to check that you’re receiving our emails. Please click this link to confirm that you are

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

amprisewinner• 6 months ago

I've been getting similar letters in the mail from Ameriprise for over 15 years. I receive all my account-related emails, but because they can't _track me doing that_ they _assume_ there is some kind of problem.

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.

kayo_20211030• 6 months ago

Hang on. The OP gets a paper statement already (there's a picture). If the email address is correct, and OP does nothing, what's the worst that could happen?

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.

ivanjermakov• 6 months ago

If you’re at my house, on my WiFi, and you open an email from HSBC, not only might HSBC know about it, but I might know about it too.

To be fair, if someone was on my local network, I would have greater issues to worry about.

effnorwood• 6 months ago

You had me at HELO

nticompass• 6 months ago

You're not using EHLO?

TheJoeMan• 6 months ago

I take bigger offense to the message that says "your emails were returned undelivered", because that is a lie. A bank, sent to a customer, a lie. "Scale" should never be an acceptable excuse but somehow we let it slide when it comes to the internet.

As an aside, at least the email wasn't "a new document is available in your secure portal click here to view it"!

believ3• 6 months ago

HSBC = The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation ... of China Do you get it now? http:// isn't a bug -- it's by design.

exidy• 6 months ago

Surely you know HSBC is a British bank? It was founded in 1865 when Hong Kong was under the control of the British and is headquartered in London.

VladVladikoff• 6 months ago

I send over 1M transactional (user opt in only) emails per day for one of my websites. We have to be pretty strict how we handle bounces and complaints or it can tarnish our sending rep. Sometimes people accidentally flag mail as spam, or maybe their client does, or maybe their server does, and this comes back to us as a complaint. Under the ToS of my email gateway I must stop sending to that address until the user updates their email. There is a lot of assumptions in this post about tracking pixels etc, without any concrete evidence. The truth could be far simpler.

janpeuker• 6 months ago

I had the exact same experience with HSBC, with a little twist: I was really impressed by their 100% online signup process with digital government ID which took less than 10 minutes. The process was extremely smooth, except for a very scammy sounding verification phone call. Within 1 day I had a digital card for Apple Pay and within 3 days a courier handed my my physical debit card. I liked the app too. I hadn't consented to marketing mail but HSBC decided to send me some "welcome upsell" anyways, which was returned as I refuse marketing mail. Immediately my card and account were blocked which sent me down the same experience as OP describes here.

NoGravitas2• 6 months ago

I am, in fact, shocked that any email clients (including the BigCo webmail clients) load remote images automatically in 2026. I haven't seen a client that didn't require an extra click to open remote resources since like 2020. Even Outlook 365 only seems to do it for emails within the same organization.

That's not how email works

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