Fifty US retailers sent nearly 42 billion emails during the Black Friday hype — and they were loaded with sneaky ways to track your habits

abdulmanannet77@gmail.comDecember 10, 2025

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Fifty US retailers sent nearly 42 billion emails during the Black Friday hype — and they were loaded with sneaky ways to track your habits

https://www.profitableratecpm.com/f4ffsdxe?key=39b1ebce72f3758345b2155c98e6709c

Retailers are using more aggressive marketing methods
Late-night marketing and tracker-laden emails are now the norm
Tracking pixels and links monitor online activity without the user’s knowledge

Over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend, the 50 largest U.S. retailers sent nearly 42 billion marketing emails to their customers.

These stats come from Proton, one of the best secure email providers. The “Spam Watch: The US Inbox Overload + Hidden Tracker Report” study examined emails sent from Tuesday, November 4 to Monday, December 1.

The report reveals that during this period, almost 80% of brands included a tracking pixel or secret link in every email during this period, and that Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend saw 10 billion emails sent to inboxes across the United States.

Brands are fighting for attention

When it comes to rewards for the most spammy senders, home decor brand CB2 sent an average of 2.11 emails per day with 13 trackers in each email, Macy’s managed to send seven emails in a single 24-hour period, and J. Crew sent three emails with 40 trackers each.

Brands also ignored non-invasive marketing strategies and started sending emails late at night and even early in the morning. Banana Republic sent one email at 12:39 a.m. on the morning of Black Friday, and Macy’s sent seven emails between 10:58 p.m. and 12:16 a.m. Saturday.

As for the trackers themselves, retailers often include a small, invisible image in the email that can automatically capture the user’s location and device type. These trackers are used to create a user profile that retailers can use to bombard potential customers with aggressively targeted marketing campaigns.

“Spam Watch’s findings confirm a harsh reality: the inbox has become a high-volume, very noisy channel where brands fight for attention while silently collecting data on every open. This is not accidental: this is an engineered attack on your attention and privacy,” said Anant Vijay Singh, Product Manager at Proton Mail.

“At Proton, we believe you shouldn’t have to sacrifice your data just to shop online. We created Proton Mail to break this cycle, giving users the power to reclaim their digital freedom and block the silent harassers who have taken over their lives.”