eli5: when unsubscribing from an email list, how does the company know which email you are subscribing from?
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The link you click to unsubscribe will be specially made for you. You’ll get a link that looks something like www.example.com/unsubscribe?subscriptionid=SOMETHING. That SOMETHING will be unique identifier that, well, identifies your subscription to that particular newsletter, and will let the website know who’s trying to unsubscribe from what.
That’s also how you (can) tell who’s opened their emails. Say there’s a company logo inside the email. It’s gonna be sent to you as a URL that points to that image. To display that logo your email client will have to download the logo from that URL. Except that URL will have an identifier like the one above that’s unique to a particular email that’s been sent out. When your client goes to that URL to fetch the company logo, the server will see the identifier and know you’ve opened that email. That’s one of the reasons why modern email clients don’t automatically load content like that.
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