Is Benchmark Email Tracking You? How to Block bmetrack.com

Benchmark email tracking is the reason that domain is there. Benchmark Email is a marketing platform that has been sending campaigns since 2004, and the hosts it uses to count your opens and catch your clicks are registered under names that never spell out the company: bmetrack.com, benchurl.com, bmsend.com, bme1.net. Inspect a message and you get a hostname with no obvious owner. That is not an accident, and not unique to Benchmark. What follows is the evidence trail, what the tracker records, and the settings that stop it.

Key Takeaways

• Benchmark Email's support site tells senders to whitelist 10 domains, and 7 of them — bmesrv.com, bmsend.com, bme1.net, benchurl.com, benchurls.com, bmetrack.com and betest.com — contain no recognizable form of the company name.
• bmetrack.com was registered on 31 March 2010 through Amazon Registrar, sits behind an AWS Elastic Load Balancer, and presents a wildcard certificate for *.bmetrack.com issued by Amazon.
• Benchmark's own knowledge base states that "we insert a tiny image into the body of the email" and counts an open when that image loads on your screen.
• Click tracking is on by default: Benchmark documents that "hyperlinks/URLs added to an email will have link tracking" and that recipients "are redirected through a Benchmark server."
• Campaign statistics are retained "for the life of your account," according to Benchmark's support documentation, so an open logged today has no scheduled expiry.

What Is bmetrack.com?

bmetrack.com is one of the domains Benchmark Email uses for its sending and tracking infrastructure, and the company names it in its own documentation. Benchmark's knowledge base page on domains and IP addresses to whitelist in your inbox lists bmetrack.com alongside bmsend.com, benchurl.com, benchurls.com, bme1.net, bmesrv.com, betest.com and three benchmarkemail.com hostnames. That page is the connection between the anonymous host and the vendor, and it exists because Benchmark needs mail servers to trust these names.

Probing the domain gives indicators rather than proof. A request to https://bmetrack.com/ returns HTTP 403 with the header server: awselb/2.0, an AWS Elastic Load Balancer. Invented subdomains such as go.bmetrack.com and click.bmetrack.com return the same 403, so the host answers on anything. Its TLS certificate carries the subject CN=*.bmetrack.com and was issued by Amazon. Whois puts creation at 31 March 2010, registrar Amazon Registrar, registrant organization redacted behind a privacy proxy.

None of that identifies who sent the message in your inbox. A wildcard certificate and a bare 403 suggest an operator that hands out a subdomain per customer or campaign and wants nobody at the root: an inference about architecture, not an accusation about any sender. To place a specific message, our guide to detecting email tracking pixels in Gmail walks through reading the raw source.

What Does Benchmark Email Tracking Actually See?

An open event, a click event, your IP address, your user agent and a timestamp, all attached to your email address. That list is not our reconstruction. Benchmark's privacy policy describes the subscriber data it processes for customers as including "campaign activity, open events, click events, bounce events, complaint events, unsubscribe events, suppression status, IP address, user agent, timestamps."

The mechanism is an image request. Benchmark's article on tracking opens on smartphones says "a small, invisible graphic is embedded in the bottom of your HTML email" and that the tracker "is unique to each campaign that you send out." Because it is unique, the request that fetches it identifies the campaign and, in practice, the recipient. An IP address narrows you to a city or an office network, a user agent names your operating system and mail client, and the timestamp is the moment the image loaded. On the click side, the email link tracking documentation is blunt: clicking a link means "they are redirected through a Benchmark server." Our explainer on email open tracking versus click tracking covers why the second is harder to escape.

An open is an inference, not proof that anyone read anything, and Benchmark says so. Its page on a contact's opens and click through history lists cases where "email addresses are marked as open in the email reports, even though the recipient did not engage": spam filters, antivirus or firewall software at the receiving server, and "ISP's like Google and Yahoo! use proxy servers to cache images." Apple's Mail Privacy Protection does the same thing deliberately: it prefetches remote content through a proxy before you look, hiding you and inflating the sender's open count at once.

Why Doesn't the Domain Say "Benchmark"?

Because separate registrable domains do two useful things for a sender: they keep tracking traffic off the reputation of the main brand domain, and they defeat any filter or human that matches on a company name. Compare the responses. bmsend.com, a sending domain, answers at its root with a 301 redirect straight to https://www.benchmarkemail.com. bmetrack.com and benchurl.com both return a bare 403 and volunteer nothing. The infrastructure that carries your mail identifies itself; the infrastructure that counts you does not.

This is ordinary practice across the industry rather than something Benchmark invented, and that deserves saying plainly. Nearly every platform runs trackers on hostnames the recipient has never heard of. The link tracking documentation adds a second layer: a new account is asked for a company domain name, which "is then used in all of your email link trackings as a subdomain." Skip that step and "the default tracking domain will be used for the campaigns."

Read that from the recipient's chair. Configure the custom domain and the links look like the brand you subscribed to, hiding the vendor. Skip it and the links sit on a shared Benchmark host, hiding the brand. Either way the hostname in your status bar tells you less than you assume.

How Do You Block Benchmark Email Tracking in Gmail?

Stop remote images from loading automatically, because the open pixel is an image and nothing else. In Gmail on desktop, open Settings, then See all settings, scroll to the Images section, choose Ask before displaying external images and save, per Google's own instructions. Benchmark confirms this works from the other side: its article on low open rates concedes that if an email client "is blocking images by default, we will not be able to track that email unless your contact unblocks the images."

Know what Gmail's default does and does not do. Google's help page says its image proxy means "senders can't use image loading to get information about your computer or location" and cannot set or read cookies through the image. The same page admits the limit: "sometimes, senders may know whether you've opened an email that has an image." Proxying strips your IP address and user agent. It does not stop the request, so the open still lands in the sender's report.

Three habits handle the click side, where images settings do nothing:

• Hover a link before you click and read the hostname in the status bar. A domain you do not recognize, or a subdomain of the brand that only appears in email, is a redirect.
• Copy the link, remove trailing campaign parameters, and open the destination directly rather than through the redirector.
• Reach the site by typing the address or using search when the message is only a prompt to visit somewhere you already know.

All three are tedious at inbox volume, which is why most people end up with an extension.

Benchmark Email vs Other Trackers: What Blockers Actually Stop

Most tools here solve the pixel and leave the redirect alone, so know which half you are buying. Ugly Email flags messages containing known trackers with a visual marker rather than silently dropping them. PixelBlock blocks pixel loads inside Gmail. Trocker is open source and marks tracked mail across several browsers. Proton Mail and HEY block remote content at the provider instead, which is thorough but means changing where your mail lives. Our side by side of the best email tracker blocker extensions sets out the tradeoffs in detail.

Gblock stays in the Gmail tab you already use and does two jobs: it stops tracking pixels loading, and it strips tracking redirects out of links so the click never touches the intermediary. Its blocklist updates on its own, which matters when senders can point a subdomain of their own website at a vendor's infrastructure and a hand kept list goes stale the week a new sender appears. We have not published a verified test against a live Benchmark campaign, and we will not claim one host by name without it.

What Senders Can Do

If you run the campaigns, three changes reduce exposure without gutting your reporting. Disclose open and click tracking in the notice you link from the footer, not only in a policy nobody opens. Treat an unsubscribe as covering the tracker, not just the send. And review retention, because Benchmark documents that statistics are kept "for the life of your account," and open ended storage of behavioural records is what regulators ask about first.

Pixel based tracking has already drawn regulatory attention in the European Union. France's data protection authority published a recommendation on the use of tracking pixels in emails, along with a questions and answers page for senders working out what compliance means in practice. We covered the CNIL recommendation and its deadline when it landed. The direction of travel is that reading an email is treated as personal behaviour, and observing it needs a basis.

Why Your Inbox Should Care About One Anonymous Domain

Benchmark says more than 100,000 marketers use the platform, and it is one vendor among dozens with the same architecture. The number that should bother you is the retention, not the size of any single sender. Statistics kept "for the life of your account" means a weekly newsletter you have taken for five years is roughly 260 recorded reading sessions, each with a time and an approximate place, in a reporting tab you cannot see or edit.

We could not find a page in Benchmark's knowledge base offering recipients a way to switch off open tracking while staying subscribed, and the privacy policy places that decision with the sender: "customers control how they use this data, including whether they enable tracking, segmentation, profiling, personalization or automation."

So it comes down to one decision that is actually yours. You cannot choose what a sender logs, which domain carries it, or how long it stays. You can choose whether the request leaves your browser at all, and everything downstream depends on that.

Sources: Benchmark Email: Domains and IP Addresses to Whitelist in Your Inbox; Benchmark Email: Does Benchmark Email track opens on smartphones?; Benchmark Email: Email Link Tracking; Benchmark Email: Why Are My Email Open Rates So Low?; Benchmark Email: How long does Benchmark Email keep statistics?; Benchmark Email privacy policy; Google: Turn images on or off in Gmail; Apple: Use Mail Privacy Protection on iPhone; CNIL: Recommandation pixels de suivi dans les courriels. Domain, header, certificate and whois observations were made on 25 August 2026 and may change.