Is Boomerang Tracking Your Email? How to Block It

If someone emailed you using Boomerang with read receipts turned on, they get notified when you open the message and they can count every link you click. So yes, Boomerang email tracking is real, though it works differently from most trackers. Instead of hiding an invisible 1x1 pixel in the message body, Boomerang inserts a visible image in the email footer that loads from its servers when you open the message. The mechanics are still the same: an image request fires, Boomerang logs the open, and the sender gets a notification. The good news is that because it relies on that image request, you can block it.

Key Takeaways

• Boomerang's read receipts insert a visible image below the sender's signature that loads from Boomerang's servers and logs your open.
• Senders see the approximate time you opened the email, how many times it was opened, and a tally of which links you clicked.
• Boomerang states it does not give senders your IP address, exact open time, or physical location, which makes it more restrained than most trackers.
• The footer image includes an opt out link, but the receipt only stays silent if you notice the image and act before your mail client loads it.
• A tracker blocker that intercepts the image request stops the read receipt before Boomerang ever learns the email was opened.

Does Boomerang Track Your Email?

Yes, when the sender enables it. Boomerang's core features are scheduling, snoozing, and follow up reminders, none of which track you. But when a sender clicks "Track" while composing, Boomerang activates read receipts and click tracking for that message. According to Boomerang's own documentation, this inserts an image into the footer of the email, just below the signature, that tells you a read receipt was requested and offers an opt out link.

When your mail client displays that image, it is fetched from Boomerang's servers, and that request is the read receipt. The sender gets an email notification roughly ten minutes after your first open, and their Boomerang dashboard keeps a running record of opens and clicks per message. Inside Gmail's Sent folder, Boomerang even marks tracked messages with a blue envelope once you have opened them and a green pointer once you have clicked a link.

Who sends tracked email with Boomerang? The same people who use it to schedule follow ups: salespeople checking whether a proposal got read, recruiters confirming a candidate saw an offer, and ordinary professionals chasing replies. Boomerang has been a fixture among Gmail productivity extensions for over a decade, so tracked messages from it are common in business inboxes.

What Does Boomerang's Read Receipt Reveal?

The sender sees the approximate time you opened the email, a tally of how many times it was opened, and whether and how many times you clicked links in the message. That is enough to answer the questions most senders care about: did you read it, when, and did you engage with what they linked.

To Boomerang's credit, that is also where it stops. The company states it deliberately does not pass along your IP address, the exact time of open, or your physical location, data points that many other email trackers happily report. So the answer to "is it safe" is nuanced: Boomerang is one of the more restrained and transparent trackers in the Gmail ecosystem, but it is still tracking. Your opens and clicks are logged on a third party server, tied to a specific message, without you having agreed to anything up front.

Is a Visible Image Better Than a Hidden Pixel?

More honest, yes. More private in practice, only somewhat. The visible footer image with an opt out link is genuinely better behavior than a covert pixel, and Boomerang deserves recognition for choosing it. But the protection it offers depends entirely on you noticing a small image sitting below someone's signature and clicking its opt out link, and there is a catch: by the time you are reading the email, your mail client has usually already loaded the image. Gmail loads remote images by default, which means the open was logged before you ever saw the disclosure. Gmail's image proxy does shield your IP address and device details from image based trackers, but it still passes the open event through, so the receipt fires either way.

In other words, the opt out helps with future messages from that sender, not the one you just opened. Click tracking has the same shape. The links work normally, but each click is counted on Boomerang's side. If you want opens and clicks to stay private by default rather than after the fact, you need to stop the tracking request itself, which is the same defense that works against every other tracker covered in our guide on how to tell if your email is being tracked.

How to Tell If an Email Uses Boomerang Tracking

Boomerang is easier to spot than most trackers precisely because it announces itself. Scroll to the bottom of the message: if you see a small image below the signature mentioning that a read receipt was requested, with a link to opt out, the message is tracked by Boomerang.

You can also confirm it from the source. In Gmail on desktop, open the message, click the three dot menu, and choose "Show original." Look for an image hosted on a domain that is not the sender's own near the end of the HTML. Compare that with a tool like GMass, which uses a covert per recipient pixel and even publishes techniques for evading blockers; we break that one down in is GMass tracking your email. Right Inbox, another Gmail extension with more than 250,000 users, ships the same per recipient pixel — covered in is Right Inbox tracking your email. Boomerang sits at the polite end of the same spectrum, but the spectrum is still surveillance.

How Do You Block Boomerang Tracking in Gmail?

The most reliable way is a browser extension that intercepts tracking requests before they load. Gblock runs inside Gmail and blocks requests to known tracking endpoints, so Boomerang's read receipt image never reaches its servers and your open is never recorded. It also strips tracked links so your clicks cannot be counted through a redirect. Because its blocklist updates automatically, it keeps pace as tracking services change domains, and it covers Boomerang alongside hundreds of other trackers like Mailtrack, Yesware, and HubSpot in one pass.

Gblock is not the only option, and it is worth knowing the field. Ugly Email and PixelBlock are free extensions that flag or block tracking pixels in Gmail, and Trocker does similar work across browsers; they are solid tools, though they focus mainly on open tracking and rely on their lists staying current. A bigger switch is moving to a privacy first email service like Proton Mail or HEY, which block trackers at the service level but require leaving Gmail entirely. If you want to stay in Gmail with both pixel blocking and link stripping handled automatically, that combination is Gblock's specific job. You can also reduce exposure manually by turning off automatic image loading in Gmail settings, at the cost of seeing broken images everywhere. For a complete walkthrough of every approach, see how to block email tracking in Gmail.

Sources: Boomerang help: how read receipts work, Boomerang help: how to use and track read receipts, Boomerang help: what is a read receipt.