Email Privacy Tester does exactly what it says – it is a way to test your email program for privacy and security leaks. And it’s free!
Created primarily to test whether your email program is giving away information about you whenever you read an email, the Email Privacy Tester also tests for security holes and bugs.
Founded by Mike Cardwell, a web developer with an impressive track record in finding and reporting security flaws, Email Privacy Tester looks for the privacy leaks, and security issues that can be exploited, and then reports them to you in realtime.
As Cardwell explains it, “it will try to exploit your email/webmail client.”
And then it lets you know if it was succesful.
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Cardwell elaborates on the Email Privacy Tester site:
Some email clients perform operations when reading an email which give away information about the reader, to the sender of the message. If you enter your email address… this application will send you a specially crafted email which uses a variety of techniques, to attempt to send information back to this server when read. It will then display the results for you.
The system will send you an email, which it’s important that you open, because that is when many of the privacy leaks are triggered.
Email Privacy Tester
You are receiving this email because somebody at IP address 50.22.186.217 entered the email address test@example.com into the form at https://emailprivacytester.com/
If this was not you, and you wish to not receive emails from this system in future, please visit my opt out page*. Please don’t mark this email as spam as it may cause difficulties for people using the Email Privacy Tester in future.
If you were the person to submit the form, and you want to look at the results page, please click here.
Please ignore anything after this line as it will probably just look like gibberish.
*Note that with respect to the opt-out language in the email, Cardwell explains that, because he doesn’t actually keep your email address on a list, what you are “opting out” of is allowing anybody to send you any further test emails through his system.
Once you open the email, if one of the nearly 40 tests are triggered, the test buttons at the website will turn red.
What’s really cool is that you can click on each test, and there is an explanation of what it is testing for, and what the privacy or security risk is if your email program fails the test.
Failing the above DNS Prefetch Anchor test means, according to the site, “Some email clients and web browsers perform DNS pre-fetching on URLs in Anchor tags of emails. This test wont leak your IP address, but it will leak the IP address of your DNS resolvers, which can provide information on which ISP you’re using and potentially your general location.
Some mail servers do DNS lookups on these URLs as part of their spam filtering process, so you may see the IP address of the mail servers DNS resolvers here, as well as, or instead of, your own.”
You can perform your own Email Privacy Test here. It’s a quick and easy test of your email privacy.
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