Re: Verify Your FamilySearch Email Address
I received an email
"Verify Your FamilySearch Email Address"
"We've noticed you're not opening our personalized family history emails."
I take issue with this. I always open emails from FamilySearch.
What might be upsetting the 3rd party marketing people is the fact that I never load remote content and I never view any emails as a web page.
That's just basic security, but it is also quite important when working on a low data rate or a pay per byte connection.
I can see all I need in an email message without having to load remote content or view it as a web page and I have the great advantage that I'm not likely to be caught out by any embedded nefarious code that might be inserted in a webpage included in a phishing message masquerading as FamilySearch.
I want to keep it that way.
If this 'Verify' warning is to be taken at face value, then it would seem that FS are requiring users to lower their security settings just so that they can be tagged with beacons.
That's not nice.
Best Answers
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@LDS Search Test I have talked with marketing about the email you received. It is simply a way to ask you if you still want to receive emails from us. No action will be taken from our side unless you make a change to your notification settings. We definitely won't disable your account.
Sam 😉
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@Sam Sulser Thanks very much for that. It will not just allay my concerns, but hopefully make it clear to anyone else who looks at the thread. 🙂
Oops! I marked my answer as the answer. It should have been Sam's.
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Answers
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To verify your email address and turn off most emails from FamilySearch, you can copy paste the link from the email into a web page.
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this is very weird
almost seems like spam or phishing.
People at FamilySearch have no way of knowing whether or not you opened up an email or not.
Be careful and dont just assume these messages are really coming from FamilySearch.
I think a moderator shoudl escalate this to get at the root of this.
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@dontiknowyou Thanks for the input, but your suggestion is actually doing exactly what I don't want. By copying the response into a web page, I am opening the web page along with all its associated content both visible and hidden. That's both an increase in web traffic and it opens the door to whoknowswhat that could be contained in the web page.
@Dennis J Yancey My presumption is that users are expected to open the emails from FamilySearch campaigns with the mail client set to load all remote content. That effectively makes the mail client into a browser for the purpose of loading all the glizty flashy multicolour posterized form of what could have been said in plain text. What it also does is load a ton of other stuff that remains hidden, like invisible single pixels known as beacons served from 3rd parties. If you open the page in a browser, then the request is sent in a message containing a unique ID associated with the email address and a number to identify the campaign. I presume that these are what is being used to determine whether the user is opening their emails. You're quite right that it seems like phishing. It's exactly like a phishing email from a crook, except that it came from FamilySearch marketing via Marketo.org a subsidiary of Adobe.
In essence a 3rd party data grabber is telling me that my account will be suspended because they can't tell whether I'm reading their emails.
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FamilySearch has no way of telling whether your emails are being read or not - dont respond to any emalls teling you that.
You do NOT need to read any emails (if you dont wish to) and nobody knowsi you have or not.
that is not something that FS would be saying. - and makes me believe you are getting emails from a phishing attempt
and I have no idea what you are saying about turning someting into a web page
no extra web page was done by anything I have done here.
and by the way this is a public page - anyone in the world can see this page (this is a public forum)
that is not the problem.
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and anybody who responds to your post - me or anyone else - will result in an email being sent to you (depending on your notification settings)
thats just plain how the community works.
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People at FamilySearch have no way of knowing whether or not you opened up an email or not.
FamilySearch does have a way of knowing. FamilySearch emails contain tracking bugs, which are links to too-small-to-see included images on a server. Some recipients use email clients that block remote images. To FamilySearch those emails appear to be unread.
@LDS Search Test but FamilySearch already tracks everything you do on FS sites, so what's the difference?
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yes - FS can track what a person does in FS (and so can any site (that forces you to log on) track what people do on their site) thats just part of how the Internet works
they cannot track whether or not you READ an email. (because that is in an email server - outside of FS's domain). They can track whether or not you visited a message page in FS though. so indirectly - yes if you ACT on an email and click on a link that takes you inside FS - yes they can detect that. But that you have simply opened up an email and read it - they cannot detect that (if you dont click on anything that sends you back to FS).
YES your email server, on the other hand, can indeed track what you do when you read your email - - defintitely. because you are using the emali server when you read your email.
BUT FS is not in control of your email server. a company like GMAIL or HOTMAIL is.
BUT FS is not going around harassing people because they arent reading their email. THAT if true, was what made me feel this might have been a phishing attempt.
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@dontiknowyou Yes, I know about the plethora of tracking cookies that are in the web pages on FS website. I counted them once. IIRC there were 123. All but 10 or so are totally unnecessary, but the web has gone insane and now there are more than ever. My issue is not with the FS website, It's that the marketing entity is threatening to suspend my account because in their eyes I don't read their emails. I do read them, but that fact is not visible to them. I might just wait until the mails stop arriving, and then change my email address to a temporary one and change it back again later.
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That my point -- I have no clue what you are referring to as "marketing entity":
FS would never be going around harassing people or threatening to suspend your account.
That is just not how FS works -- and if that is what happened -- you were defintitely NOT talking To people from Familysearch - but possibly spammers or phishers
FS does not threaten to suspend accounts based on whether or not you choose to ignore emails.
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@Dennis J Yancey The messages you type here are not emails so they can't be compared. The emails that are sent by the marketing organisation are not just plain text like they used to be. They are an email containing HTML content, and a wrapper for encoded content, which is almost like a web page, but not quite, because there are no cookies and no scripts (YET!). That's why so many emails now have an invitation to "View this in your browser" or "View this as a web page". The organisation running the marketing campign would prefer you to use your browser because then they can drop tracking cookies and beacons and run scripts. If everybody refused to allow this, then the marketing organisation would never be able to prove how effective or annoying their campaign was.
When somebody opens a normal email, the sender gets nothing except maybe a reciept if you have that set up. When somebody opens a web page, the host can immediately gain information about your browser, your computer, your location etc. That's why you are prompted to "View as a Web Page"
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@Dennis J Yancey there are tracking bugs in the emails FamilySearch sends out. Please actually read the page I linked and then examine your inbox, so you understand that FamilySearch also tracks (or tries to) what emails we read.
@LDS Search Test is talking about those tracking bugs and receipt of an email that threatens to suspend recipients' FamilySearch accounts unless recipients confirm by clicking a link to a web page that they do in fact receive the FamilySearch emails containing tracking bugs. Even the threat email contained a tracking bug.
It is all very yucky.
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FS would never be going around harassing people or threatening to suspend your account.
I received an email from FamilySearch today that says:
Action Needed—Verify Your FamilySearch Email Address
We've noticed you're not opening our personalized family history emails. We know how busy you are and don't want to bother you if you're not interested in getting occasional communications on how to use the world's largest free family history website.
Click "Play" to keep receiving FamilySearch record hints, tips and tricks, and ancestor memories.
Click "Pause" to take a break from receiving FamilySearch emails for a while.
And the email contains an unambiguous tracking bug that contained a long personalized string I have replaced with "redacted": <img src="https://mk.familysearch.org/trk?t=1&mid=redacted" width="1" height="1" style="display:none !important;" alt="" />
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I've just realized that the statement made in the original email was wrong:
"We've noticed you're not opening our personalized family history emails."
It should say:
"We've noticed that we can't tell whether you're opening our personalized family history emails."
Just like you can't tell whether I open a letter, or flip the channel as soon as an ad appears.
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There is a good article on OSXDaily about turning off remote content in the Mail app. There is probably something similar for other systems elsewhere.
https://osxdaily.com/2021/11/25/stop-remote-loading-images-email-mail-iphone-ipad-mac/
.. about 2/3 of the way down the page ...
"Note that preventing the loading of tracking pixels can throw off email newsletter subscription services (like ours), because how most of the email newsletter providers function is by loading a pixel to notify the service the email has been delivered, received, and opened by the recipient. By disabling the images from loading, all of that data is blocked, and could result to some dysfunction or decline in the email newsletter service."
So, unfortunately, to allow one means you have to allow everyone. That lets the devil through the door, and destroys your first line of defence against nefarious content.
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I can selectively load the tracking pixel in a given email. I choose not to.
What irks me is the forced choice response and the implied threat that if I do not respond my account will be deactivated.
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