Is Brevo Tracking Your Email? How to Block It

If you have received a newsletter, promotional offer, or transactional confirmation from a Brevo customer, brevo email tracking was almost certainly running in the background. The pixel fires the instant Gmail renders the message. Your IP address, approximate location, device type, email client, and open timestamp are logged on Brevo's servers and surfaced to the sender in a real time dashboard — none of which requires your knowledge or consent. This guide explains exactly how it works, what the sender sees, and how to stop it.

Key Takeaways

• Brevo embeds a 1x1 invisible tracking pixel in every HTML campaign email by default, firing the moment Gmail renders the message.
• Every link in a Brevo campaign is rewritten to route through Brevo's redirect servers — historically sibpages.com (legacy Sendinblue) and now click.brevo.com — recording each click before forwarding you onward.
• Senders receive your IP address, city level geolocation, device type, email client, open count, and a per link click breakdown inside their Brevo analytics dashboard.
• France's CNIL issued guidance in 2026 requiring explicit consent for tracking pixels, but enforcement varies across campaigns and Brevo's tracking remains on by default for all customers globally.
• Gmail users can block both the pixel and the redirect links with a tracker blocking extension before the open is ever recorded.

Does Brevo Track Your Email?

Yes, and it does so by default on every campaign. Brevo is a full stack email marketing platform — it handles campaign creation, contact list management, automation, and delivery. Tracking is not an optional add-on; it is core infrastructure baked into every HTML email the platform sends. Senders do not have to enable it. Recipients cannot opt out of it at the point of delivery. According to Brevo's own documentation on campaign statistics, open tracking and click tracking are reported per contact by default for every campaign sent through the platform.

Brevo operates as a data processor under GDPR, which means the legal responsibility for obtaining recipient consent sits with the sender, not Brevo. In practice, the sender's privacy notice rarely mentions email engagement tracking in terms a recipient would recognize. You subscribed to a newsletter; you likely did not read six pages of data processing agreements specifying that each open would log your IP address and infer your city.

The scale matters here. Brevo's 500,000 plus business customers span small online shops, SaaS companies, nonprofits, media publishers, and agencies across more than 180 countries. If you receive marketing email in any volume, at least some of it almost certainly passes through Brevo — including, until 2023, anything that arrived from a Sendinblue address.

What Data Does Brevo Collect When You Open an Email?

The open tracking mechanism is a 1x1 transparent image — invisible to the reader — embedded in the HTML of every Brevo campaign. When Gmail downloads images to display the email, it fetches that pixel from Brevo's servers. That single request carries enough information to log:

• The exact timestamp of the open
• How many times the email was opened (unique opens vs. total opens)
• Your IP address, used to derive an approximate city and country
• Your device type — desktop, mobile, or tablet
• Your email client and operating system

Click tracking works through link rewriting. Every URL in a Brevo campaign is replaced before sending with a redirect through Brevo's own infrastructure — legacy Sendinblue campaigns used domains under sibpages.com, while current Brevo campaigns route through click.brevo.com and related subdomains. When you click, Brevo's server records the click, ties it to your contact profile in the sender's account, and forwards you to the original destination. The redirect is fast enough that most recipients never notice it.

Brevo also offers a site tracker — a JavaScript snippet that senders can embed on their own website. If you click through from a tracked email and land on a site running that snippet, Brevo extends tracking into your website visit, connecting your email engagement to your browsing behavior on that domain. The full picture the sender can build: you opened the email at 7pm on a Tuesday from a mobile device in Lyon, clicked the product link, and spent four minutes on the product page.

One important nuance: Apple Mail Privacy Protection, rolled out from iOS 15 onwards, causes Apple's servers to pre fetch email images — including tracking pixels — before the recipient even opens the message. This generates false open events in Brevo's dashboard. For senders, it inflates open rate figures. For recipients using Apple Mail, it means the pixel fires on Apple's infrastructure rather than yours, which obscures your real IP address. Gmail does not offer equivalent protection; Gmail's image proxy passes images through Google's servers but the open event itself still registers.

To understand whether a specific email is tracking you, see our guide on how to tell if your email is being tracked.

Does the Sendinblue Rebrand Change Anything?

No. Sendinblue rebranded to Brevo in May 2023, but the underlying platform, infrastructure, and tracking mechanics are the same. If you received emails from a Sendinblue customer before 2023, those emails used the same pixel and link redirect approach now operating under the Brevo name. Legacy tracking domains from Sendinblue — including sibpages.com — are still live and still route clicks for older campaigns or customers who have not migrated their templates.

The rebrand was primarily a commercial repositioning — Sendinblue wanted to signal expansion beyond email into SMS, CRM, and landing pages. From a privacy standpoint, the change is cosmetic. A blocklist entry for Sendinblue tracking domains remains relevant today. If you have set up custom filters or tracker blocking rules referencing Sendinblue, those rules still apply to Brevo traffic.

How to Tell If an Email Was Sent Through Brevo

The most direct method is checking the email source. In Gmail on desktop, open the message, click the three dot menu, and select "Show original." Look for image URLs containing sibpages.com or brevo.com tracking subdomains, and look for links rewritten to click.brevo.com or sibpages.com in the href attributes. Either confirms a Brevo send.

You can also check the email headers. Brevo sent campaigns typically include an X-Mailer or X-Brevo header, and the sending infrastructure will route through Brevo's mail servers. The From address may be the sender's own domain — Brevo supports custom sending domains — so the sender domain alone is not a reliable indicator. The redirect links in the body are more conclusive.

Brevo is far from the only platform using this approach. Mailchimp routes clicks through list-manage.com. Constant Contact uses rs6.net. The pixel plus redirect pattern is the industry standard; what differs between platforms is only the domain name in the URL.

How to Block Brevo Email Tracking in Gmail

Brevo's tracking pixel fires when Gmail renders the image. The redirect runs when you click a link. Both happen silently, and both can be intercepted before they report back to Brevo's servers.

Gblock is a Gmail extension that strips tracking pixels from incoming emails before they load and rewrites redirect links back to their original destinations. It identifies requests to Brevo's tracking domains — including both the current brevo.com endpoints and the legacy sibpages.com infrastructure — and blocks them automatically. The sender's dashboard shows no open and no click, because neither event was ever recorded. Both features run passively; there is no per email manual review.

Gblock is not the only option. Ugly Email and PixelBlock are free Gmail extensions that flag or block tracking pixels; they are solid for open tracking but do not strip redirect links. Trocker works across browsers and handles pixels from multiple providers. For recipients willing to leave Gmail entirely, Proton Mail and HEY both block trackers at the service level — Proton strips pixels server side before the message reaches your inbox, and HEY marks tracked emails separately and requires a deliberate action to load images. The tradeoff is a full platform switch rather than a browser extension layered over Gmail.

Turning off automatic image loading in Gmail settings (Settings → General → Images → "Ask before displaying external images") stops pixels from firing but also breaks all images in every email, including product photos and logos. For most users the experience cost is too high. The more targeted approach is a blocklist based extension that allows legitimate images through while stripping tracking endpoints specifically. For a complete walkthrough of every method, see how to block email tracking in Gmail.

What the Regulatory Picture Looks Like

Brevo is headquartered in Paris and operates under GDPR as a data processor. That designation means Brevo's customers — the senders — bear the legal obligation to establish a lawful basis for tracking and to disclose it to recipients. Brevo provides the infrastructure; the compliance burden falls on whoever presses send.

The regulatory environment tightened materially in early 2026. France's CNIL issued guidance requiring explicit consent for tracking pixels, making it the first EU data protection authority to address email tracking pixels directly and with specificity. The guidance holds that a pre ticked consent box in a sign up form does not constitute valid consent for tracking pixel data collection. Senders in France must now obtain a separate, granular consent for tracking before embedding pixels in campaigns.

Enforcement across the 500,000 plus businesses using Brevo is fragmented. Many senders outside France have not updated their consent flows. Brevo's default behavior — tracking on, no recipient notification — has not changed. For recipients, the practical takeaway is that regulatory improvements take years to translate into changed defaults at the platform level. Blocking tracking yourself is faster and more reliable than waiting for enforcement to catch up.

Sources: Brevo help: understand your email campaign statistics; Brevo help: about the Brevo tracker; Brevo GDPR compliance overview.