Google clicks on GitHub notifications for you

At work I use GitHub notifications heavily. However lately I’ve been noticing a strange / annoying phenomenon: GitHub notifications randomly mark themselves as “read” without me looking at them. This is actually quite disruptive to my workflow, since I use the “read” status to determine what things haven’t yet gotten my attention.

After a long time trying to figure out what the problem was, I finally found a GitHub discussion including people who experience the same issue. Apparently this has been happening for a while, but for some reason I haven’t been falling victim to it until now.

In short: I have notification emails set up in GitHub. Notification emails contain tracking pixels. Once a tracking pixel is downloaded, the notification is marked as read. Since Gmail^[1] automatically downloads email contents like tracking pixels upon reciept (rather than when opening the email), notifications will often be marked as read before I ever get the chance to see them.

This is a good example of a problem that’s hard to troubleshoot, but easy to fix. You have two options:

• Disable email notifications at https://github.com/settings/notifications.
• Get an email provider that doesn’t prefetch all your email contents.

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