Airmail Read Receipts: Does Airmail Track Your Email?

Airmail read receipts are mostly history. Bloop SRL, the company in Siena, Italy behind Airmail, stopped offering them to iPhone buyers after a May 11, 2017 update, and the Mac app only gets them through an old plugin. So for most people the real Airmail email tracking question runs the other way. When a newsletter hides a tracking pixel in a message, does Airmail stop it? On iPhone and iPad, Airmail documents one switch for that, Privacy Mode. On the Mac, Airmail's own help page says it loads remote images by default, which means the pixel fires.

Key Takeaways

• Airmail's help center says read receipts "will not be available for the users who have bought the app from the App Store after the May 11, 2017 update," and on macOS they need a separate plugin.
• Microsoft says Visual Studio App Center, where Airmail still hosts that Mac plugin, was retired on March 31, 2025, and our request to its distribution API returned "Access to distribution API is restricted."
• Airmail for macOS help states "By default, Airmail loads remote images referenced in messages," while the iOS app offers a Privacy Mode toggle that turns off "autoload marketing tracking pixels."
• Real-Time Mailbox Monitoring, an Airmail Pro feature, keeps your account tokens on Bloop's servers "for a maximum of ten days after the last user app activity," though Airmail says those servers "do not store email message content."
• Airmail never documents how its read receipts detect an open, and 19 of the 20 candidate subdomains we tested on airmailapp.com returned NXDOMAIN, so we found no pixel host to name.

Does Airmail Have Read Receipts?

Yes, but only for some users. Airmail's iOS help article is titled Read Receipts - Airmail for iOS - Only for old users, and its first line reads: "Please note that the read receipts will not be available for the users who have bought the app from the App Store after the May 11, 2017 update."

For those older users, an eye icon and the Send button in the composer turn "light blue" when a receipt is on. The help page's screenshots show an account level default with three choices: Never, Ask and Always. Tracked messages collect in a Read Receipts folder, where the eye's color reports status:

• Grey: none of the recipients has read the message.
• Yellow: some recipients in a group have read it.
• Blue: all recipients have read it.

The page adds: "Yes, the read receipts will display the notifications when someone reads your sent email."

On the Mac, Airmail's FAQ says: "macOS: Install the read receipts plugin and enable in Preferences > Plugins." Airmail introduced that plugin in a July 21, 2016 post called Read Receipts Beta. No page ties read receipts to Airmail Pro, which the FAQ prices at "a monthly 9$ or yearly 49$ subscription."

Can You Still Get the Mac Read Receipt Plugin?

Not from the link Airmail provides. Airmail's plugins help page says Read Receipts "Require Airmail 3 VERSION 370 or newer" and points to a download on install.appcenter.ms. That service's public releases endpoint still lists four builds, the newest version 1.4 uploaded February 19, 2022; a nonsense app name returned "Could not find app," so the listing is real.

Downloading is another matter. Microsoft's App Center retirement notice says "Visual Studio App Center is scheduled for retirement on March 31, 2025. After that date, it will not be possible to sign in with your user account nor make API calls." When we asked for any of the plugin's releases, the API answered "Access to distribution API is restricted."

Airmail's own pages pull in two directions. A help article on Mac App Store sandbox limits, updated May 9, 2026, warns that "certain read-receipt or PGP/GPG plugins distributed outside the Mac App Store" may stop loading. It then says many requests, read receipts among them, "are already covered by features available directly in Airmail Settings." The FAQ, updated March 28, 2026, still says to install the plugin. We could not confirm which is true without a Mac account.

Are Airmail Read Receipts Pixel Based?

Airmail never says. None of its help articles, its 2016 beta post or its four privacy policies explains how an open gets detected. Two designs are common:

• A standard receipt request, called a Message Disposition Notification. The recipient's app decides whether to answer, and RFC 8098 says "it is strongly recommended that the user agent obtain the user's consent before sending an MDN."
• A tracking pixel, a tiny remote image unique to each recipient. It reports whenever the recipient's app loads images, with no prompt at all.

Airmail's per recipient eye icon closely matches Spark's. Readdle's Read Statuses help page says "The eye icon is blue: the mail has been opened by all recipients," and "Read Statuses work using invisible images called tracking pixels added to an email," as our Spark Mail read receipts investigation details. A matching interface is not a matching mechanism, though.

We looked for a pixel host anyway, on October 5, 2026:

• Control: a nonsense subdomain of airmailapp.com returned NXDOMAIN, so the zone has no wildcard and a miss means the name doesn't exist.
• Candidates: we tried 20 names, including track, pixel, open, read, receipts, readreceipt, push, img and proxy. Nineteen returned NXDOMAIN; only mail.airmailapp.com resolved.
• Certificates: CertSpotter listed 11 certificates covering seven names: airmailapp.com, www, help, links, news, reviews and sdk. The sdk host serves plugin framework docs. The links host redirects its root to itself and returns 404 for a nonsense path, which tells us nothing about its purpose.
• Code: Airmail's public plugin framework on GitHub, last pushed August 10, 2019, contains no read receipt code.

So we have no hostname to give you.

Does Airmail Block Tracking Pixels on Incoming Mail?

On iOS, yes, if you turn on Privacy Mode; on the Mac, not by default. Airmail's iOS Privacy Mode page sends you to Settings, Privacy mode, and lists what the switch does:

• "remove account server processing"
• "remove autoload marketing tracking pixels for mail read"
• "Disable autoload images"
• Snooze stops syncing across devices, and "anonymous analytic will be turned off"

The Airmail homepage puts it more simply: "Privacy mode also blocks tracking pixels, and prevents images from loading automatically." Neither page gives the default.

The Mac app has no single switch. Its Appearance preferences page is plain: "By default, Airmail loads remote images referenced in messages." A macOS privacy article updated May 8, 2026 says disabling "Load remote content automatically" under Preferences, Privacy "prevents senders from confirming that you have opened their email and blocks most email tracking pixels." A single toggle "is currently planned for a future release."

Airmail's help pages disagree on where that setting lives: Preferences, Privacy in the privacy article, Preferences, Appearance in the autoload images article. Once autoload is off, each message offers Once, Always or Cancel. Always sticks for that sender, and undoing it means deleting an entry from a file called LoadImages.plist.

And when an image does load? None of the 358 English help articles we downloaded describes an image proxy. Gmail's image help page promises "Senders can't use image loading to get information about your computer or location." Airmail makes no such promise.

Does Airmail Route Your Mail Through Its Own Servers?

Only if you turn on its cloud features, and then Bloop's servers hold a key to your mailbox. The iOS App Store listing says "Airmail does NOT store your messages on our servers. Server processing is very limited and performed only if users enable Realtime Mailbox Monitoring." Airmail's real time inbox monitor page says that feature "is required to access your mailbox from our servers" for push notifications, remote Snooze, Send Later and Remind me. "If you disable that, all the app logic is inside the app and no data is sent to our server." Push itself is a Pro feature, per Airmail's push setup guide.

The Airmail for iOS privacy policy, last updated October 2, 2026, spells out the details:

• With monitoring on, "We process incoming messages, deliver push notifications, and update the badge count."
• "Our cloud mailbox services do not store email message content."
• For Gmail and other OAuth providers, Bloop stores "the user's email addresses and account tokens for a maximum of ten days after the last user app activity." For iCloud, it stores your app specific password.
• The backend "uses Google Cloud infrastructure in the United States."

The retention numbers don't line up. The FAQ says "Temporary data is deleted after 7 days inactivity," the iOS policy says ten days, and the Mac privacy policy, updated October 3, 2026, says "This does not mean every category of data is erased after a fixed seven-day period." That's the trade every server push client makes: to wake your phone the moment mail lands, someone else's computer has to be able to log in to your mailbox.

Airmail for Business, a $49.99 purchase on the App Store, skips all of it. Its listing says it "does not use our backend servers for services like realtime mailbox monitoring, send later, and synchronized snooze."

Does Airmail Itself Track You?

Not for advertising, by its own account, but it does collect product analytics tied to identifiers. The iOS policy states: "Airmail does not sell personal data or use it for third-party advertising or cross-company tracking." Its first party analytics "may include pseudonymous user and installation identifiers," kept "for up to 365 days." For crash and hang reports, "Sharing is on by default unless you have turned it off."

The App Store listing for version 27.0.3, released October 2, 2026, carries a Data Linked to You label covering purchases, contact info, identifiers, usage data and diagnostics, with your email address used for "Developer's Advertising or Marketing." Neither the iOS nor the Mac listing has a Data Used to Track You section.

And Airmail's own emails? The iOS policy keeps a standard clause saying its mailing services "may also collect data concerning the date and time when the message was viewed," which is open tracking, then adds: "Newsletter delivery is currently disabled." The airmailapp.com SPF record authorizes Google and Mandrill to send its mail.

Airmail vs Spark, Edison and Mailbird

Airmail is the only one of these four whose own documentation says it loads remote images by default. The other rows come from our Edison Mail privacy investigation, our Mailbird email tracking investigation and the Spark piece above.

Spark and Airmail make a neat pair. Per our Spark investigation, Readdle pulled Spark's first read receipts from new installs on July 9, 2015, then brought tracking back for paying users. Airmail cut read receipts for new iPhone buyers in 2017 and, on iOS, never brought them back. Mailspring went the other way: our Mailspring email tracking investigation found its read receipts switch on by default for every new draft.

What This Means for Your Gmail Inbox

Airmail's image rules replace Gmail's the moment you read Gmail inside Airmail, whose Mac app "connects directly between your Mac and your mail provider." Open the same newsletter at mail.google.com and, per Google's help page, the sender can't use the image to learn your location. Open it in Airmail for Mac on default settings and the pixel loads with no proxy that Airmail documents. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, which we explain in Apple Mail fakes half of all email opens, belongs to Apple's Mail app, and none of Airmail's 358 help articles mentions it.

The reverse holds too: Privacy Mode protects only what you read in Airmail. Google concedes that "Sometimes, senders may know whether you've opened an email that has an image." We break down what gets past Google's proxy in the tracking pixel that learned to dodge Gmail, and how Gmail handles receipt requests in how Gmail read receipts work.

How Do You Lock Down Airmail and Block Tracking Elsewhere?

Flip two settings, then decide how much server help you want. Per Airmail's macOS privacy settings guide and its iOS Privacy Mode page:

1. On iPhone and iPad, turn on Privacy Mode under Settings.
2. On the Mac, turn off remote content. Uncheck "Load remote content automatically" under Preferences, Privacy, or Autoload Remote Images under Appearance on older builds, then quit and relaunch.
3. Pick Once, not Always, when you need a message's images. Always lets that sender track every future open.
4. Skip Real-Time Mailbox Monitoring unless you need push. If you used it, the data removal page lists "Airmail Push Servers" among the services it clears.
5. Turn off analytics. On the Mac, uncheck "Send anonymous usage statistics" and "Send crash reports"; on iOS, crash sharing has its own switch in Privacy settings.

For Gmail in a browser, these are the extension options, checked on October 5, 2026:

• Trocker (10,000 users, version 3.4.1, updated July 10, 2026) says it "keeps you safe in all webmails by blocking known trackers in the background," with extra features in Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook.com.
• PixelBlock (40,000 users, updated December 2, 2025) is "a Gmail extension that blocks people from tracking when you open their emails."
• Ugly Email has no Chrome Web Store listing anymore. Its Firefox version shows 2,069 average daily users and a last update on March 6, 2024.
• Gblock works in Gmail on desktop Chrome only. Its blocklist updates itself from Gblock's servers, it flags unknown images of 150 bytes or less, and it strips tracking parameters such as utm_source from links.

To be plain: Gblock does nothing inside Airmail. If you read everything in Airmail, the settings above cover most of it; Gblock fits the Gmail tab you still open on your laptop. More in how to block email tracking in Gmail and our roundup of email tracker Chrome extensions.

What We Could Not Verify

We did not install Airmail or send it tracked mail. That leaves open how read receipts detect an open, whether iOS Privacy Mode starts on or off, and whether the Mac app now has the built in read receipts the sandbox article mentions. App Center refused to serve the plugin, so we couldn't inspect it. The Airmail for Business listing names "Managed Read Receipt" among its MDM settings without saying what it controls. Airmail's docs also never say how it answers receipt requests other people send you.