Mail Privacy Protection-alike tooling for Office 365, Thunderbird or other Windows programs

[kiddingguy]

In iOS 15 Apple introduces Mail Privacy Protection, but that’s only for people who are on iOS/Mac-devices. To basically block, hide IP, or kinda mess with every tracker found in a mail/newsletter/promotional mail.

 

is there a Windows alternative for this, when using e.g. Office/Outlook 365, Thunderbird are other mail clients on Windows?

 

Maybe from within Internet Security related software, such as ESET, Bitdefender and/or Norton? Or by use of plugins/additional tooling which scans for IMAP/POP related mailaccounts on your computer?

[theefool]

For exchange server, there is scanning of email/attachments for malware built in, or the use of 3rd party.

 

For links in emails, their are 3rd party that when you click a link, it will scan for malicious content. 

 

There are also services that block incoming mail for those type of things.  You can deny/allow by domain/ip/etc.

 

Not sure if this is what you are talking about.

[kiddingguy]

@theefool Kinda what I mean.

 

I'm more "looking" for this Apple solution, but than on regular mail-apps on Windows, such as Outlook (as part of Office 365), Thunderbird, or other alternative mail-clients (e.g. Mailbird); it strips out all trackers or blocks it in some ways that it's untraceable for the sender.

 

But, my guess would be that it's easier to have some background task running which scans for IMAP/POP-mail and filters/blocks it on that level. In that way it's not mail-client dependent, but more on OS-level.

I'm not looking for an Exchange-solution, because I don't run Exchange.

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

My understanding is that this is done specifically by the Apple Mail app in conjunction with Apple's servers.  Here are a few thoughts on how you might accomplish something similar:

 

1. Block access to tracking networks via hosts file (this will require you to know all of the fully-qualified domain names for each tracking networks' computers)
2. Run email/webmail client on a remote computer, and use a remote desktop connection from your smartphone or tablet to access the email (the remote computer's IP address, etc, will be tracked, not the phone's)
3. Write your own mail server software similar in concept to Apple's or (Microsoft's Exchange) to proxy or fetch HTML content content in email so that all accesses from it for the tracking network's content appear to come from a single location (your mail server).
4. Have mail server re-write the bodies of received emails to modify or remove the tracking links from it.
5. Switch to text-based email client (may cause some formatting problems with HTML email).

The issues with numbers 1, 3 and 4 are that you will need to obtain information about the tracking networks (IP address ranges, domains, FQDNs, etc.) and spend some time every day updating your tools to recognize them.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

 

[kiddingguy]

@goretsky Thx for the info.

I’m more looking for an automagically tool like this Apple thing in/on Windows (or specific email-clients).

 

Not by doing this manually…

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

It is fundamentally a service which is constantly updated throughout the day, so you would need to use one of the service providers which offers it or a similar service.  There's no product which offers this functionality as far as I can tell.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky