One problem for me is opening more interesting links than I have time to get to. Bookmarks don't really solve the core problem of not properly managing my time. When I used to use RSS, I would have many feeds racking up dozens of unread and potentially interesting posts as a sort of todo list which I never got around to clearing. So I decided to forget about RSS and try not to worry about catching every single item out there.
There have been plenty of games with over 1 million in sales being labelled as roguelike in the past decade or so, for example: FTL, Binding of Isaac, Slay the Spire, Dead Cells. You might note that each of these games has a completely different style of gameplay to the point where the roguelike label is only describing the format, similar to a game being single-player vs. multi-player or competitive vs. cooperative. I'm somewhat surprised by deck-building games in particular using the Roguelike label as they are more or less procedural and "permadeath" by definition.
I've seen "run-based" being used to describe the format, which isn't quite as catchy of a term but gets the point across better.
"Traditional roguelike" is how I've started searching for games such as Angband which are actually, well, like Rogue.
Generally images in emails are linked, and not actually sent with the email. So any time the email is opened, the email client makes a request to the image host, and this request can contain a unique identifier for the recipient.
Some email services will cache the images for a period of time but in many cases it will perform a fresh request each time the email is opened.
There are certainly companies doing this already. The only advantage of a tracking pixel is if your email content doesn't have any images already. And I guess it sounds scarier for a headline.
I'm curious how they're doing it. Without having used their product, I gather that they're blocking certain known trackers and/or checking for tracking pixels directly. But it's not hard to put a unique tracking link on any arbitrary image which is part of the email's content. The only full defense is turning off all images.
edit: apparently they automatically cache the images on delivery, which should work. This is really a change that needs to come from the mail providers so good on them. As long as they don't try and assume what the user is interested in like Gmail does, they can drop tracking all they want.
That is going to lead to it appearing that people have high email engagement which will cause them to be on more mailing lists and at higher frequency than they otherwise would be.
Gmail can do their own tracking on what emails a user opens. If they find that a user is leaving a lot of mail from a domain unread, they might decide to start shifting that mail into the spam box to provide a better UX.
As a sender, it's impossible to get any specifics from Google as to when it happens. You can get a generalized spam report rate from them but that's about it.
They don't, but they also don't share that information with the sender. Gmail wants senders to be proactive and auto-unsubscribe disengaged recipients, which requires tracking open/click rates.
And on top of that, some mail providers like Gmail won't even tell you this is happening. I understand why they don't but it's really difficult if you're a small time newsletter trying to get off the ground.
Tracking pixels are the closest we have to determining whether somebody opens (& hopefully reads) the email. Click rate is the next best thing but unless you are an incredible marketer it will be far below open rate, possibly 1/4 or less. What Google is implying there is to use tracking images and automatically unsubscribe users that don't load them after several messages.
Google is not explicitly saying to use tracking images. That might be the only possible implementation of this advice, but they're not explicitly telling you to do this. Also, consider their use of the word "consider". It's not a hard rule to them.
And personally, I still think it's a bad idea to automatically unsubscribe people who are interested in your newsletter merely because they're not loading images. At the very least, make it very explicit that you're going to do this, and maybe give them the option to turn the auto-unsubscribe off.
