Hey Reddish,
David here, Digilent's Marketing Manager. Thanks for expressing your feedback! We actually love a good critical forum post because it helps us put things in perspective.
I'd like to fill in the context for this particular email, and provide transparency. This is a common practice in likely most email you have ever received from most companies. We look at simple metrics like the percentage of customers opening emails, and the percentage of times that certain pieces of content get clicked so we can know if it's genuinely useful or not to you all.
The entire purpose of this automated email is to, ironically, not bother people. It's sent to folks who have been receiving our emails but haven't interacted with them in some time as a last chance before we remove them from our list. In theory, if you are receiving emails from us but not interacting with them in any way (open/click), then they aren't useful. We don't want to be dead weight in your inbox, so we excuse ourselves.
I do want you to know that I value and appreciate your opinion. I also want to reassure you that we don't do anything nefarious with this common metric information other than "customer open = good; customer don't open = bad".
Cheers, and keep up the good work in our forum community!