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tom actually replied!

Hi aurora,

Thanks for the email. Yes, the tracking links are really annoying, and I don't like them myself. But there are two reasons: first, it lets my mailing list provider check that I'm not sending spam. (If I send out an email to nearly 40,000 people and no-one clicks a link, that's a bad sign.) And second, it lets me remove people who aren't interested in the newsletter any more. If someone's not clicked a link in three months, I can remove them from the distribution list, which cuts down on unwanted email, helps my sender reputation, and saves me literally thousands of dollars as I have to pay per-subscriber. It turns out that for sending identical messages to nearly 40k+ people, there's no good alternative!

All the best,

-- Tom