Hands-On Tech 289: Understanding Email Tracking Pixels

And the first thing that we should get to is the short answer, right? It is a question of whether someone is able to tell that you have opened their mail.

I hate to tell you, Lyle, she's not really pulling your leg.

Her emails almost certainly have what is essentially a tiny little image in it.

It's a it's an invisible one pixel image.

And when you open your mail, Gmail loads that image, that tiny little image you can't even see.

And then the tracker on her end logs the open because when you opened it again, it sent it had to pull that image from somewhere.

So her tracker goes, oh, somebody pulled that image and then gives her a notification, letting her know that that image was opened.

So that is something that is possible.

There is a way to keep it from happening.

And that's by telling Gmail to ask before actually loading images.

And then if that happens, well, there's no loading of that invisible image.

And therefore there's no way for it to know that you opened the email.

Email on its own doesn't have read receipts or read receipts, depending on who you ask.

Right out of the gate, we have this sort of nebulous state because...

Yes, you are correct that there's no red receipts, but you are incorrect that it's not possible for something to be checked.

And that's because email itself may not let you get those little notifications on its own.

the way that iMessage or WhatsApp does.

And the app that is sending and receiving, they don't talk to each other on their own, right? Once it's delivered, email doesn't report back.

But modern email, When you think about the way that a mail message goes out, it's kind of like a little web page.

It's like a little website.

And those web pages, of course, can pull references to images that exist on the internet or files that exist on the internet.

And specifically in this case, they're using images because those images, excuse me, are... more often allowed in email as opposed to files which are served as attachments.

So it doesn't give that same signal.

Loading a picture means that when you do so, you are asking someone's server for it and that request that the server gets is the notification.

Now, Google does go in to detail about this and says on its own page, quote, sometimes senders may know whether you've opened an email that has an image.