I think perhaps the drive I felt to raise this issue was more of a knee-jerk reaction to seeing the program work by default in a way that I feel doesn’t respect or empower me as a user nor respect the people I chose to send mail to. I really don’t want to know if recipients have opened/read my messages, and don’t feel it’s right to be tracking them without their explicit knowledge of what is happening.
Just want to chime in and second your opinion. I wasn’t aware of the tracking being applied by default (let alone that it was a feature) and was almost about to uninstall Mailspring immediately after not being able to find a global setting to disable it. I’ve only later learned from another GitHub issue that it’s possible to turn it off in the options below the mail, which I assume few first-time users explore if they just want to go on with working on their mail.
I fully understand that this project operates between being free, open source software and being a product that you would like to sell, but being transparent to your users (and potential customers) about which (somewhat) privacy-invasive options are applied by default would go a long way in increasing trust and reputation for your software.
That said, thanks for the great piece of software!
(Originally posted by slhck on GitHub.)