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This is an "order confirmation" from Walmart.com. Notice that critical information is missing: WTF I ordered.

Amazon is perpetrating the same offensive BS. I don't order from them anymore either.

This behavior prevents customers from searching their records for purchases, for warranty or tax purposes. There's no excuse for it. I complained to Walmart, and their lame excuse was "security." Unbelievable.

Call vendors out on this. There's no excuse.

The reason they do this is presumably because they don't want your email provider to know what you're buying. I don't know about Walmart but Amazon provides a browse-able, searchable list of your orders going back to the very start. I can still see what I bought 20 years ago, although the oldest ones for which I can still see the invoice are only 19 years ago.
Amazon used to show you what you purchased in your emails, but Google started extracting those purchases from Gmail and put them into some other Google service, at which point Amazon stopped showing details in their emails.
That's not a solution though. That means you have to go to every vendor you bought stuff from and individually log into their sites and search for something you need warranty service for (or whatever). It's a deliberate waste of customers' time.

I have a mailbox called "order confirmations," which I search when I need to find a purchase. I'm just not going to reward vendors that make this impossible anymore. Who cares if my E-mail provider sees what I bought? I'm pretty anti-data-mining in general and I don't use Google apps, but this is dumb.