What if I don’t think Mr. Marketer has a god given right to help me receive more relevant emails, and I would like a way to indicate that preference to my mail client which downloads emails on my behalf from a mail server I pay good money for? How does the current email tracking infrastructure facilitate this preference? What actual choice do users have in this matter today?

Until we actually figure out these questions outside of layering hacks (i.e. “block image subresources entirely”), it seems like we should definitely put a pause on the whole effort.