Is Braze Tracking Your Email? How to Block It

You have probably never heard of Braze, and that is exactly the point. It is not the company sending you an email, it is the infrastructure running quietly underneath the ones from Grubhub and thousands of other apps already installed on your phone. Braze served 2,528 companies as of October 31, 2025, and its platform reached more than 7.8 billion monthly active users by October 2025. Braze email tracking works the same way most marketing platforms do under the hood: a hidden pixel logs when you open a message, and every link gets rewritten before it forwards you along. Here is exactly what that looks like and how to shut it off in Gmail.

Key Takeaways

• Braze reached 2,528 customers and more than 7.8 billion monthly active users by October 2025, making it one of the largest customer messaging platforms most consumers have never heard of by name.
• Braze's open tracking pixel is a 1x1 invisible image inserted automatically into HTML emails, and disabling it for one person only works on the SendGrid and SparkPost email providers, per Braze's own documentation.
• Braze click tracking rewrites every http and https link through a branded subdomain the sending company configures in its own DNS, logging the click before redirecting you to the real destination.
• Braze Currents exports every open, click, send, and unsubscribe event in real time to a company's own data warehouse, extending that history well past Braze's own 30 day retention window.
• Gblock blocks Braze's tracking pixel before it loads inside Gmail, working the same way it already blocks tracking from Intercom, Mailjet, and the other platforms covered in this series.

How Big Is Braze's Reach Into Your Inbox?

Braze calls itself a customer engagement platform, and in practice that means it is the messaging engine sitting behind the apps on your phone, not a brand you interact with directly. Per Braze's fiscal third quarter 2026 results, its customer count grew to 2,528 as of October 31, 2025, up from 2,211 a year earlier, and 303 customers now pay Braze more than $500,000 a year, a 29% jump year over year.

The scale shows up in Braze's own year end numbers too. Per Braze's 2025 year in review, the platform reached more than 7.8 billion monthly active users by October 2025, up nearly a billion from the year before, and powered 4.5 trillion messages and canvas actions across email, push, SMS, and in app channels during the year. During Cyber Week 2025 alone, Braze delivered a record 102.5 billion messages in seven days.

Grubhub is one of the customers willing to put its name on the record. Per Braze's Grubhub case study, Grubhub used Braze to run a personalized "Welcome Stream" onboarding sequence across email and push, reporting an 836% increase in ROI. If you have ordered food delivery, streamed a show, or signed up for an app recently, there is a real chance the receipt or reminder in your inbox routed through Braze's infrastructure rather than the company's own mail servers.

Does Braze Track Email Opens?

Yes. Braze email tracking includes an open pixel added to HTML emails once open tracking is turned on for a workspace, and per Braze's own documentation on email preferences, that pixel is "an invisible 1 x 1 px image" that is "automatically inserted into email HTML" to detect whether a recipient opened the message. Braze registers an open the moment your email client requests that image, the same mechanic nearly every tracking pixel relies on. By default the pixel sits as the last element in the email body, though workspaces can move it to the first tag instead, a setting that makes the open register faster and more reliably.

There is a wrinkle worth knowing. Per Braze's documentation on open pixel and click tracking, companies can disable open tracking for one person through an email_open_tracking_disabled field on that profile, but this self serve control is "available for SparkPost and SendGrid only." If a company sends through a different provider, there may be no simple switch to turn tracking off from their side at all, which leaves the decision with you as the recipient.

How Does Braze Click Tracking Work?

Braze rewrites every clickable link in an email so it routes through a tracking domain before forwarding you to the real destination. Per Braze's documentation on open pixel and click tracking, click tracking "only rewrites links that use http:// or https:// URLs," meaning mailto and tel links pass through untouched unless a company deliberately swaps them for an https redirect first.

Unlike Intercom, which sends every rewritten link through a shared domain such as intercom-clicks.com, Braze requires each customer to configure its own branded subdomain for tracking. Per Braze's documentation on setting up IPs and domains, "a tracking domain is used to wrap links in your emails for click-tracking and branding purposes," verified through a CNAME record the customer adds to its own DNS. That means the link you hover over often shows something like link.company.com rather than a generic Braze address, which makes it harder to spot at a glance than platforms that route every customer through the same public redirect domain.

Braze also offers an optional layer called link aliasing. Per Braze's documentation on link aliasing, a workspace can append a lid query parameter to the original link rather than replacing the domain entirely, and "this lid value allows Braze to track, monitor, and aggregate user interactions with the link" for reporting and audience segmentation. Combined, the two systems mean Braze can know not just that you opened an email, but which specific link inside it you clicked.

What Data Does Braze Store About You?

Braze stores each open and click event tied to your profile and can export that history in real time to a company's own data systems. Per Braze's message engagement events glossary, Currents streams eleven categories of email events, including send, delivery, open, click, bounce, spam complaint, and unsubscribe, out to a connected Snowflake, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage account as they happen.

Per Braze's Currents FAQ, "message engagement events (sends, opens, clicks, and so on) include the Braze user ID and, when present on the profile, the external identifier," and some email engagement events may include the email address itself. Inside Braze's own dashboard, that data is retained for 30 days before it needs to be pulled into a company's own warehouse for longer term storage, meaning the sending company, not Braze, ultimately decides how long your open and click history sticks around.

On the compliance side, Braze offers a Data Processing Addendum and, per Braze's GDPR FAQ, tools that let a company self serve data subject requests, including API calls to export or delete a person's data on request. GDPR and CCPA tooling exists, but it is the sending company, not Braze and not you, that decides whether to use it before your data ever gets collected.

Why Email Users Should Care

Braze is not a scam operation or a data broker selling your information to strangers, and none of this is illegal. It is a business tool doing exactly what the companies paying for it asked it to do, which is precisely why antivirus software and spam filters walk right past it. Nothing about a Braze powered receipt email looks malicious, because it is not. It is a legitimate app you signed up for, logging when you open its emails and which links you click, then feeding that data into a dashboard someone checks the next morning.

That gap between legitimate and invisible to you is the whole reason a dedicated blocker matters here. You cannot opt out of Braze directly, because you likely never signed up for Braze at all. You signed up for a food delivery app, a streaming service, or a retailer, and Braze came bundled in underneath as the messaging layer. Our guide to blocking email tracking in Gmail covers why this invisible tracking behaves differently from the phishing and malware threats most security tools catch, and why Gmail's own settings only get you partway there.

How Do You Block Braze Email Tracking in Gmail?

A few approaches work, each with real tradeoffs.

Disable automatic image loading. In Gmail, go to Settings, then General, then Images, and choose "Ask before displaying external images." This stops most pixels, including Braze's, but it also hides every legitimate image in every other email until you approve it one at a time, which gets tedious fast.

Hover before you click. Hovering over a link in a Braze powered email reveals the branded tracking subdomain in your browser's status bar before you click, though it does nothing to stop the open pixel from firing the moment the email renders.

Switch to a client with built in protection. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection preloads every image regardless of whether you open it, defeating open tracking but not click tracking. Proton Mail and HEY both proxy or block remote images by default, though switching your primary email client is a bigger step than most people want just to stop one company's pixel.

Use a dedicated blocker built for Gmail. Extensions like Ugly Email and PixelBlock were early, genuinely useful tools for flagging tracked emails, but both rely on static domain lists that struggle to keep up as platforms like Braze roll out a fresh branded subdomain for every customer that signs up. Gblock runs inside Gmail and blocks tracking pixel requests before they load, including the branded subdomain infrastructure Braze relies on, without hiding legitimate images. Its blocklist updates automatically instead of shipping as a fixed, manually maintained list, and it strips known tracking parameters, including link aliasing style parameters like lid, from the links themselves rather than only flagging the pixel after the fact.

The Bottom Line

Braze is the latest platform in this series to run the same playbook already documented in Intercom's and Mailjet's outbound tools: a pixel that logs the moment you open a message, and a rewritten link that logs the moment you click one. What makes Braze different is scale paired with invisibility. It touched more than 7.8 billion monthly active users by October 2025, yet most people who receive a Braze powered email never learn Braze's name at all. Braze's closest competitor runs the identical pattern: Iterable tracks opens and clicks the same way across its own consumer brand roster. Block the pixel and the link rewriting these platforms share, and it stops mattering whether you have heard of the company running it.