Is cloudHQ Email Tracker Watching You? How to Block It

Someone from a recruiting firm emails you a job description. You read it on your lunch break, decide it is not for you, and close the tab. Two minutes later their phone buzzes with a text message saying you opened it. That is the product the cloudHQ email tracker sells, and it works inside ordinary Gmail, from an ordinary Gmail address, with nothing in the message that looks like marketing. This guide covers how it works, the domains it hides behind, what it can and cannot learn about you, and how to block it.

Key Takeaways

• Email Tracker by cloudHQ has 20,000 users on the Chrome Web Store and, per cloudHQ, tracks every email by default.
• The extension inserts a zero size image and rewrites links so they point at numbered domains such as cloudhq-mkt1.net and cloudhq-mkt23.us, each path starting with /mail_track/.
• cloudHQ markets location and device detection, but Google states that senders can't use image loading in Gmail to get information about your computer or location.
• cloudHQ stops counting the sender's own opens with a Chrome block rule, which proves a single browser rule is enough to silence the pixel.
• cloudHQ also publishes a tracking blocker, Email Privacy Protector, with 10,000 users, so the same company sells both sides of the pixel.

What Is the cloudHQ Email Tracker?

The cloudHQ email tracker is a Chrome extension that adds open and click tracking to Gmail. Its Chrome Web Store listing shows 20,000 users, a 4.1 rating from 256 ratings, and version 1.0.2.10, updated January 29, 2026. It is published by cloudHQ LLC of San Francisco, which also makes MailKing, Auto Follow Up for Gmail and dozens of other Gmail add ons.

The listing promises "Mobile text, desktop, and email notifications when your email is read", reminders if an email goes unopened after 48 hours, link tracking, and Gmail labels that sort sent mail into lists such as opened but unanswered. It pitches the tool as "ideal for salespeople, customer service reps, head hunters, and more".

One correction to the old name. The extension used to be called Free Email Tracker, and free-email-tracker.com still redirects to its site, but it is no longer free in any lasting sense. cloudHQ's pricing page lists a 30 day free trial with no credit card, then a Premium plan at €6.90 per month per user. The cloudHQ FAQ says the same: "Email Tracker is free during a 30-day trial (no credit card required). After the trial, you can choose a paid plan to keep using the service."

Is cloudHQ Tracking On by Default?

Yes. The product site at mail-tracker.com says: "There is no need to actively 'turn on' tracking for individual emails. By default, all your emails will be tracked." To skip tracking on one message, the sender has to click the icon at the bottom of the compose window "so it turns light gray".

So the question for you, the recipient, is not whether a cloudHQ user chose to track you. It is whether they remembered not to. Every message they send is instrumented unless they opt out one email at a time, and that includes personal notes to friends as well as sales pitches.

There is one visible concession. cloudHQ's setup guide states: "By default, we'll include a link at the bottom of all tracked emails that lets people know you're using our tracker." Paying users can remove it, which means the senders most committed to tracking are the ones whose mail carries no notice at all.

How Does the cloudHQ Pixel Work Under the Hood?

When a cloudHQ user hits send, the extension injects an image tag into the message body and rewrites the links, all inside Gmail before the email leaves. cloudHQ's support article on tracking images describes pixels generically as "small 1 x 1 GIFs". The shipped code is a little stealthier than that. We unpacked version 1.0.2.10 of the extension, and its content.js builds this tag:

<img width="0" height="0" class="chq-track-image" alt="" style="display:flex; border: 0; width: 0px; height: 0px">

Zero by zero, not one by one. The code places it near the top of the message, or just above the sender's Gmail signature or the quoted thread. Its source follows a fixed pattern:

• Open pixel: https://www.cloudhq-mktN.net/mail_track/mail/<track id>?uid=<sender id>
• Tracked link: https://www.cloudhq-mktN.net/mail_track/link/<track id>?uid=<sender id>&url=<real destination>

The uid is the sender's numeric cloudHQ account ID, and it rides along in every pixel and every link. The code also chooses the domain from that ID, taking the account number modulo the size of a 30 domain list. The practical effect is that each sender is pinned to one domain. The likely purpose is to spread cloudHQ's traffic across many hostnames, so no single one carries every customer's reputation.

Link tracking is on in the code's defaults, with one exception worth knowing. If a message has more than five Bcc recipients, the extension turns link tracking off for it, and a comment in the source labels that case "SPAM". cloudHQ's own site notes that unlimited link tracking requires the Premium plan, the only plan on its pricing page and the one the 30 day trial starts on.

Which Domains Does cloudHQ Track From?

The extension hardcodes 30 hosts: www.cloudhq-mkt1.net through cloudhq-mkt9.net, plus cloudhq-mkt11.us and cloudhq-mkt13.us through cloudhq-mkt32.us. None of them say "tracker", and none of them are on cloudHQ's main domain.

We checked them live on September 25, 2026, with controls, following our usual tracking pixel detection method:

• DNS. 36 numbered domains resolve: cloudhq-mkt1.net to cloudhq-mkt10.net and cloudhq-mkt11.us to cloudhq-mkt36.us. A nonsense subdomain of cloudhq-mkt1.net returns NXDOMAIN, so there is no wildcard record inflating the count, and cloudhq-mkt99.net does not exist. Six live domains (mkt10.net, mkt12.us and mkt33 to mkt36.us) are not in the shipped extension's list, which suggests the pool is still growing. CertSpotter's certificate transparency data shows a certificate for www.cloudhq-mkt36.us issued June 23, 2026.
• Redirects. Every numbered domain we tried answers /mail_track/mail/ with an HTTP 301 to the same path on www.cloudhq.net, served through Cloudflare. On cloudhq-mkt1.net a nonsense path redirects too, so the redirect alone proves nothing. On cloudhq-mkt23.us it does discriminate: the tracking path goes to cloudHQ, a nonsense path goes to a placeholder page.
• Payload. On www.cloudhq.net, /mail_track/mail/<id>?uid=<made up number> returns content-type: image/gif, a 1 x 1 GIF. A nonsense path on the same host returns a 404 page. The link path with a made up account returns a cloudHQ page reading "The account tracking this link has been disabled or deleted in cloudHQ", which confirms what the endpoint is for.

Does cloudHQ See Your Location and Device?

cloudHQ says yes; in Gmail, Google says mostly no. The product page claims "Email Tracker will let you know who reads your emails, when, from where, and on which device they do so", and describes a feature that lets senders "learn recipient's geolocation and detect your recipient's device", complete with "a map showing the location of the recipients when they opened your email."

Gmail loads external images through Google's own proxy servers. Google's Gmail image settings page states that "Senders can't use image loading to get information about your computer or location." cloudHQ's own code confirms the route, since the rule it uses to ignore the sender's opens matches googleusercontent proxy addresses. For an open in Gmail, then, the map pin is unlikely to be you.

Two caveats. The proxy only hides the details. The open itself is still recorded, and cloudHQ's support says that when recipients show images "there is almost zero the margin of error of our tool." And clicks skip the proxy entirely: a tracked link sends your browser straight to a cloudhq-mkt domain before forwarding you, so the click reaches cloudHQ from your own connection.

What cloudHQ keeps about recipients is not spelled out. Its privacy policy describes recording IP addresses and resolving them to a city through ipinfo.io for its Secure Document Sharing feature, but we found no section describing what Email Tracker logs when a tracked message is opened.

Does cloudHQ Count the Sender's Own Opens?

No, and how it avoids that is the most useful thing in the codebase. The FAQ answers no: "Email Tracker has the intelligence to detect that you (the sender) are opening the email." It also skips Bcc copies sent to a CRM.

The "intelligence" is a Chrome declarativeNetRequest rule. When a user logs in, the extension's background worker registers a block rule for images matching googleusercontent(.*)proxy(.*)mail_track(.*)mail(.*)uid= followed by that user's own ID. When the sender opens their sent mail, Chrome refuses to fetch the pixel, and no open is logged.

Read that as a recipient. cloudHQ's engineers solved the "sender opens own email" problem with a single browser block rule for their own pixel. The same trick, pointed at every sender instead of one, is all a recipient needs. The tracker's code proves the pixel can be blocked cleanly from inside Gmail.

How Can You Tell an Email Is Tracked by cloudHQ?

Look for cloudhq-mkt or /mail_track/ in the message. Our walkthrough on detecting tracking pixels in Gmail covers the general method; for cloudHQ specifically:

• Hover over a link. If the status bar shows cloudhq-mkt followed by /mail_track/link/, the link is tracked. The real destination sits in the url= parameter at the end.
• Open the source. In Gmail, click the three dots, then "Show original", and search for mail_track/mail, chq-track-image or cloudhq-mkt. Any hit means a pixel is present.
• Check the footer. Senders who have not paid include cloudHQ's link at the bottom by default. Its absence proves nothing, since paying users can remove it.

What This Means for Your Inbox

The cloudHQ email tracker sits in the same family as Mailmeteor and GMass: tools that turn a normal Gmail message into an instrumented one while leaving it looking personal. The difference is the feedback loop. A cloudHQ user can get a text message on your first open, a reminder if you ignore them for 48 hours, and a Gmail label listing you as opened but unanswered.

Now the part that should reset your expectations. cloudHQ also publishes Email Privacy Protector: Is My Email Tracked?, a tracking blocker with 10,000 users whose listing promises that "no one will ever be able to know when you opened your email". Its setup guide says it blocks mail tracked "by cloudHQ email tracker or by other mail trackers". Its rules file names cloudhq-mkt1.net through cloudhq-mkt6.net and uses a generic keyword rule for the rest.

Put the two listings side by side: 20,000 installs for the tracker, 10,000 for the blocker, from one company. Tracking has become a product category where the vendor sells the weapon and the armor, which is a strong argument for choosing your protection from someone who does not also sell the tracker. For a wider map of who is doing this, see our comparison of Gmail read receipt tracking tools.

How Do You Block the cloudHQ Email Tracker?

Stop your browser from fetching the pixel, and don't let tracked links run through cloudHQ from your own connection. Our full guide to blocking email tracking in Gmail goes deeper; here are the realistic options, with their limits.

• Gmail's image proxy alone. It already hides your IP address and location on opens, but it still fetches the image, so the open is still reported. Not a fix.
• Turn off images. In Gmail, go to Settings, See all settings, Images, then choose "Ask before displaying external images". Free and effective against the pixel, but every newsletter image breaks too, and it does nothing about tracked links.
• Skip the redirect. Copy the address from the url= parameter of a tracked link and paste it into a new tab. Tedious, but the click never reaches cloudHQ.
• Ugly Email. Open source and well loved, but its Chrome Web Store listing now returns an empty page. Only the Firefox add on (version 4.1.2) is still offered, so Chrome users need something else.
• PixelBlock. 40,000 users, marks blocked pixels with a red eye in Gmail. It is focused on pixels and leaves link tracking alone.
• Trocker. Open source with 10,000 users, blocks known trackers and heuristically flags tracking images and tracked links in Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook.com.
• Gblock. Blocks the pixel inside Gmail with a blocklist that updates automatically. It matches the entire cloudhq-mkt family with one pattern, so the six newer domains missing from cloudHQ's own list are covered too. It also routes links through its proxy, so a tracked click never reaches cloudHQ from your connection, and it strips common tracking parameters. You stay in Gmail.

For the full field, including extensions that track rather than block, see our roundup of email tracker Chrome extensions and the head to head on Ugly Email, PixelBlock and Trocker.

The Honest Summary

cloudHQ is not hiding what it does. The listing says it, the FAQ says it, and by default tracked mail carries a footer. But the tracker ships on by default, hides behind 36 numbered domains with no brand in them, and markets a location map that Google says image loading in Gmail cannot supply. The part it can deliver, the open and the click, is exactly what reaches the sender's phone.

The fix is the same one cloudHQ built for its own users: a rule that refuses to load /mail_track/ images. The only question is whether it protects the sender or you. As Apple's approach shows, preloading images muddies the data without stopping it, and it does nothing in Gmail on a desktop browser. Blocking the request does.