I recently put my old Hotmail account on my phone, which I traditionally only checked a few times a year. I went from 1-2 spam emails every few months to several a day, after going through all the old ones and marking them as spam. How is this possible? I haven’t given this email out in years, and none of my monitoring services have flagged this email recently. It seems spammers somehow know this email is active again.
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Email can have images in them. These can be in the email itself, but they can also be links to images, and your email viewing program requests these images from the website. The website now knows that somebody requested the image. You could also embed arbitrary tracking information in this request (e.g. instead of someone requesting spam.com/image.jpg, they request spam.com/image.jpg?email=nurse-robot), to which the website will respond with the same static image, but record the additional tracking information.
This is generally done with an invisible image, also called a [tracking pixel](https://en.ryte.com/wiki/Tracking_Pixel). Many private email viewing programs will block all external image requests for this reason. This results in quite ugly emails, but it has the benefit that your email viewing patterns are more private.
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