Is Dotdigital Tracking Your Email? How to Block It

Yes. If a shop you bought from once sends you campaigns through Dotdigital, Dotdigital email tracking is recording the moment you open them. The company is blunt about it: its documentation states that "we can track opens in HTML emails using a hidden pixel automatically placed at the bottom of your emails," and that every link is rerouted first. The giveaway sits in your own inbox — hover any link and the destination reads dmtrk.net or ddlnk.net rather than the shop you meant to visit.

Key Takeaways

• Dotdigital publishes its own tracking domain list, naming dmtrk.net, ddlnk.net and their r1, r2 and r3 subdomains for email link tracking, plus t.trackedlink.net for site and ROI tracking, according to Dotdigital's tracking domains article.
• Every tracked link gets a parameter appended that looks like ?dm_i=1AAA,2BBB,CC3CC,DD4D,5, which is how a click is tied back to you personally rather than counted anonymously.
• Dotdigital's Opens report shows the sender the number of times you opened a campaign, the first and last open times, your IP address and your user agent, with a Map of Openers heatmap built from that IP.
• Clicking through from a Dotdigital campaign to a tracked website identifies your previously anonymous browsing session, and that identification lasts 365 days from your last click.
• Gmail's "Ask before displaying external images" setting stops the open pixel but does nothing about the rewritten links, because those are ordinary anchors.

What Is Dotdigital and Why Is It in Your Inbox?

Dotdigital is a UK headquartered marketing automation platform, formerly dotmailer, that ecommerce brands plug into Magento, Adobe Commerce, Shopify and BigCommerce. You never chose it. You gave your address to a retailer whose newsletter happens to run on Dotdigital.

That distinction matters. A transactional sender tracks opens to prove a receipt arrived; an ecommerce platform tracks them to build a profile. Dotdigital's contact scoring documentation describes engagement as "the behavioural data you store for your contacts, for example, opens and clicks for campaigns," feeding a numeric score that ranks you against every other subscriber. Our breakdown of Omnisend's tracking covers a near identical setup at a competing vendor.

What Is dmtrk.net, and Why Is It in Your Links?

dmtrk.net is one of Dotdigital's link tracking domains, and it appears in your links because a click cannot be counted unless it passes through a server the platform controls first.

Dotdigital lists the full set on its own support site, which is genuinely rare — most vendors leave you guessing. For email link tracking it names dmtrk.net and dmtrk.com along with the r1, r2 and r3 subdomains, plus ddlnk.net and ddlnk.com with the same numbered variants. Site and ROI tracking runs through t.trackedlink.net and its r1-t, r2-t and r3-t siblings. Web behaviour tracking uses trackedweb.net and static.trackedweb.net. Dotdigital says it publishes the list "in the interests of recipient security and transparency," so recipients "can be sure they've received a legitimate email."

Read that a second way, though. A vendor that publishes its tracking hosts has handed you a blocklist. Most CRM and sales tools never disclose the hostname behind their pixel at all, which is why the recognition trick works here better than almost anywhere else.

The mechanics are documented too. Dotdigital states that "all tracked links are redirected through your sending domain" and that it adds "a URL string to the end of each link, which looks something like this: ?dm_i=1AAA,2BBB,CC3CC,DD4D,5." That string is not a campaign identifier alone. It is what lets the platform log the click against your contact record rather than a running total. Senders can also point a custom subdomain at the vendor, which hides the giveaway entirely — our guide to email link wrapping and URL rewriting covers that case.

What Data Does the Sender Actually See?

More than an open count. Dotdigital's reporting exposes you individually, by name, with timestamps and network details attached.

From the platform's campaign reporting documentation, a marketer viewing a campaign can pull:

• An Opens report listing "all the recipients who opened the campaign and the number of times they opened it," with first and last opened dates and times next to your first and last name.
• Your IP address and user agent, revealed under a More details view alongside the date and time of each individual open.
• A Map of Openers, a heatmap of where recipients opened the campaign, derived from those IP addresses. Dotdigital notes the location skews on a VPN, since the VPN server's address is used instead.
• An Email Client Breakdown covering which clients and which versions the campaign reached.
• Per click detail: the documentation says senders can see "date and time of each interaction, URL of link clicks, and IP address and User agent of the recipient."

Reopen counts are the part people underestimate. One open is noise. Seven opens of the same sale email over two days is a signal that gets you moved into a high intent segment and sent more mail, and none of that required you to reply, click or say a word.

How Does One Click Link Your Email to Your Browsing?

Because the Dotdigital Tag on the retailer's website waits for exactly that click to put a name on an anonymous visitor.

Dotdigital's web behaviour tracking documentation is explicit. The Tag collects page title, page URL, view duration, browser type and IP address, but the visitor stays unidentified until one of two things happens: they submit their email address on the site, or they click through from a campaign email. That single click retroactively attaches a browsing session to a contact record.

Then comes the detail almost nobody notices. Identified browsing data is retained for 365 days from the last time the contact identified themselves, and the clock resets on every campaign click. Click one link a year and your browsing on that retailer's site never returns to anonymous. A weekly newsletter subscriber who clicks occasionally is, in practice, permanently identified for as long as the list keeps mailing them.

Why Email Users Should Care

Newsletters feel disposable, which is precisely why nobody inspects them. A discount code from a shoe shop gets opened on the sofa at 11pm, and that timestamp goes straight onto a profile deciding how often you get mailed and what you get shown.

Dotdigital's customer base sits mostly in the UK and EU, which puts this squarely inside a live regulatory fight. The CNIL spent 2026 pushing email tracking pixels into the same consent regime as cookies, covered in our piece on the CNIL email tracking pixel recommendation, and Italy's Garante set out its own rules on email tracking pixels in May. Dotdigital's own GDPR guidance already tells senders that "consent for any processing activity (such as tracking opens and clicks) should be informed." Whether the retailer mailing you actually collected that consent is not something you can verify from your inbox.

One wrinkle is worth knowing. Since 2021, Apple's Mail Privacy Protection has preloaded remote content by default, and corporate gateways prefetch images before anyone reads the message. Both invent opens nobody performed. The score built on your behaviour is partly fiction, and you paid for it anyway.

How to Block Dotdigital Tracking in Gmail

Stop remote images loading, understand what Gmail's proxy does not do, then deal with the rewritten links separately. Those three steps, in that order.

1. Turn off automatic image loading. Click the gear icon in Gmail, choose See all settings, stay on the General tab, scroll to Images, select "Ask before displaying external images," and save at the bottom. No remote image loads until you approve it, so the pixel at the bottom of the Dotdigital campaign never fires. Per Google's documentation for the setting, the cost applies everywhere: every product photo, logo and signature graphic in every other email now sits behind a prompt. Marketing mail is mostly images, so a Dotdigital campaign becomes close to unreadable.

2. Do not mistake Gmail's image proxy for protection. Gmail routes remote images through Google's servers rather than letting the sender's host reach you directly, which masks your real IP address and user agent. Useful, but narrow. The fetch still happens, Dotdigital still logs an open, and your engagement score still moves. To check which of your messages carry a beacon, our guide to detecting email tracking pixels in Gmail walks through reading the message source.

3. Strip the pixel instead of hiding every image. An extension running inside Gmail can remove the tracking beacon before the message renders, so the request never leaves your machine while ordinary images still display. Gblock works this way: it blocks known tracking pixel requests, strips known tracking parameters out of links, and pulls an updated blocklist rather than shipping a frozen list. Being straight about the limits, it is not an anti phishing tool, and no blocklist catches a technique nobody has documented yet.

What image blocking will not solve: clicks. A rewritten link is a normal anchor, and no image setting touches it. Hover first and read the status bar. If it starts with dmtrk.net, ddlnk.net or one of their r1, r2 or r3 subdomains, that hop is being logged against your name. Deleting the ?dm_i= string after the redirect resolves is too late — the click is already counted. Stripping the parameter before you follow the link is the only version that stops the record being written.

Which Blocker Fits Your Setup?

Several tools cover parts of this and none covers all of it. The honest version, including what each one leaves on the table, with a fuller breakdown in our roundup of email tracker blocker extensions.

If you are staying in Gmail, the choice is between extensions, and the differences that bite are blocklist freshness and whether the tool touches links at all. For Dotdigital, link handling matters more than usual: the click is what identifies your browsing for the next 365 days. A pixel only blocker leaves that door open.

The Bottom Line

Dotdigital tracking is not hidden, exactly. The company documents the pixel, names the domains and describes the dm_i parameter on its public help pages. The asymmetry is that a marketer reads those pages and you never do, while the retailer's privacy policy compresses the whole apparatus into a sentence about improving your experience.

Blocking the pixel settles it without a confrontation. The campaign still arrives, the images you want still load, the deals still work, and the row beside your name in the Opens report stays empty.

Sources: Dotdigital, Understand open tracking and link tracking, Dotdigital, All the tracking domains we use, Dotdigital, More reports, Dotdigital, Web behavior tracking with the Dotdigital Tag, Dotdigital, Tracking and the GDPR, Dotdigital, Contact scoring overview, Google, Display images in Gmail, and Apple, Mail Privacy Protection.