Is Flodesk Tracking Your Email? How to Block It

Flodesk built its reputation on beautiful, design forward newsletters, the kind independent shop owners and coaches send instead of the boxy templates everyone else uses. That polish hides the same mechanism every other email marketing platform runs: Flodesk email tracking logs when you open a message and follows you through every link you click, and there is no visible setting that lets you turn it off as a recipient. Here is what Flodesk's own help center and privacy policy say about how that tracking works, and how to stop it from loading inside Gmail.

Key Takeaways

• Flodesk's privacy policy confirms it embeds "pixels and web beacons" in emails to understand whether messages have been opened, acted on, or forwarded, the standard mechanism used across the email marketing industry.
• Flodesk automatically rewrites every link in a sent email into a tracking link before delivery, then redirects the click through its own system before forwarding the reader to the real destination.
• Flodesk's own documentation warns that bot scans and Apple's Mail Privacy Protection inflate open and click counts, and that Flodesk analytics cannot filter bot activity out.
• Flodesk passed 100,000 small business and creator customers and 13 billion emails sent in the past year, according to a January 2026 company announcement, so the odds that a newsletter in your inbox runs on Flodesk are rising fast.
• Unlike some competitors, Flodesk gives senders no dashboard toggle to disable open or click tracking, which means the only reliable way to stop it is on the recipient's side, inside Gmail itself.

Does Flodesk Track When You Open an Email?

Yes. Flodesk's privacy policy states plainly that the company includes "pixels and web beacons in e-mails to understand whether messages have been opened, acted on, or forwarded," and defines a pixel tag as "a piece of code embedded in the Services that collects information about engagement." That is the same 1x1 transparent image mechanic that Mailchimp, Brevo, and Mailjet all rely on: a tiny, invisible image loads from Flodesk's servers the moment Gmail renders the message, and that single request confirms the open.

Flodesk's help center article on email analytics describes the results of that tracking rather than the mechanism itself, but it is upfront about the limits. Flodesk warns senders that opens can register even when nobody actually reads the message, because Apple's Mail Privacy Protection automatically pre fetches images, including tracking pixels, before a person ever opens the email. Gmail offers no equivalent protection of its own, so a Gmail open recorded by Flodesk reflects an actual person loading images in an actual inbox, not a bot pre fetch running on Apple's infrastructure.

How Does Flodesk Click Tracking Work?

Every link in a Flodesk campaign gets rewritten before the email leaves Flodesk's servers. Flodesk's own support article on bot clicks confirms this directly: "Flodesk automatically converts your links into tracking links so clicks and activity can be measured." Click a link inside a Flodesk email and your browser is briefly redirected through Flodesk's own infrastructure, which logs the click and attributes it to your subscriber record, before forwarding you on to the page the sender actually intended.

Flodesk does not publish a single named redirect domain the way Mailjet routes through mjt.lu or Brevo routes through click.brevo.com, and it notably does not let senders point a custom branded domain at its click tracking the way those competitors do. That is a real difference worth naming rather than guessing at: some senders can make tracked links look like they belong to nobody but themselves, while Flodesk keeps the redirect on its own infrastructure regardless of who is sending. The same bot click article also warns that mailbox providers and security scanners click these rewritten links automatically, right after delivery and before a human ever opens the inbox, which is a large part of why click counts on any platform, Flodesk included, run higher than the number of people who actually clicked.

What Data Does Flodesk Collect About You?

Beyond the open and click events themselves, Flodesk's privacy policy discloses that it automatically collects the internet protocol (IP) address behind a request and location information, including approximate location derived from IP address. That means an open or a click does not just tell a sender that you engaged with their email; it hands over enough to place you in a city, tied to your subscriber profile, without you taking any action beyond opening a message you already agreed to receive.

Flodesk also references conversion APIs in its policy, server side tools that let senders connect email engagement to activity elsewhere, such as a purchase on a linked storefront. None of this is unique to Flodesk. It is the same category of data collection we found when researching Brevo's tracking behavior and Mailjet's tracking infrastructure: IP address, approximate location, device signals, all captured per recipient and rolled up into a dashboard the sender can check in real time.

Can Senders Turn Off Flodesk Email Tracking?

Not in any way Flodesk documents publicly. Some competing platforms, Mailjet among them, expose an account level toggle or a per message API parameter that a sender can use to disable open tracking for a specific campaign. Flodesk's help center contains no equivalent article, and its analytics pages describe tracking as a built in feature of every send rather than an opt in one. For a creator running a newsletter through Flodesk, tracking is simply part of how the platform reports performance back to them, not a setting they chose to flip on.

That absence of a sender side toggle is precisely why recipient side blocking matters more with Flodesk than with a platform that offers senders an off switch. If the company emailing you has no easy way to disable the pixel even if they wanted to, the only lever left belongs to you.

Why Email Users Should Care

Flodesk is not spyware, and the businesses using it are not doing anything unusual for the email marketing industry. But Flodesk markets itself specifically to small creators, coaches, and shop owners, many of whom send newsletters to lists built from genuine relationships: former clients, workshop attendees, people who bought something once and stayed subscribed. Those are exactly the emails a reader is least likely to suspect of tracking, because the sender feels personal rather than corporate.

That is exactly the gap generic security software misses. Antivirus tools and spam filters exist to catch malware and phishing, not a legitimate design studio's welcome sequence quietly confirming to a Flodesk dashboard that you opened it at 7:40 a.m. from a specific city. A dedicated email tracker blocker for Gmail does not need to judge whether the sender meant any harm. It just keeps the pixel from loading and the rewritten link from reporting back first, closing the same gap for Flodesk that it closes for every other platform running this playbook.

How Do You Block Flodesk Email Tracking in Gmail?

A few approaches exist, each with real tradeoffs.

Disable automatic image loading. In Gmail, go to Settings, then General, then Images, and choose "Ask before displaying external images." Nothing loads without your approval, which stops the pixel cold, but it also hides every legitimate image in your inbox until you manually approve each one, which gets tedious fast.

Hover before you click. Hovering over a link before clicking reveals the rewritten redirect URL in your browser's status bar, confirming the click will be logged. It does nothing about the open pixel, and it only helps if you remember to check every single link, every single time.

Use a dedicated blocker built for Gmail. Gblock runs inside Gmail and intercepts tracking pixel requests before they load, without hiding legitimate images or breaking the rest of your inbox. Its blocklist updates automatically rather than shipping as a fixed, manually maintained list, so it keeps pace as platforms like Flodesk adjust their infrastructure. Gblock also strips known tracking parameters from links, not just pixels, which matters specifically because Flodesk offers senders no built in way to turn click tracking off.

How Does Gblock Compare to Ugly Email, PixelBlock, and Proton's Approach?

It is worth naming the alternatives honestly. Ugly Email and PixelBlock are free, longstanding Gmail extensions that flag or block tracking pixels, useful for catching open tracking but generally focused on pixels rather than rewritten click links. Trocker works across multiple email providers and browsers, handling pixels from a range of platforms with a broader but less Gmail specific approach. Proton Mail and HEY take a different path entirely: rather than blocking trackers inside Gmail, they proxy remote images through their own servers before delivery, which hides your IP from senders but requires leaving Gmail as your email client altogether.

Gblock's focus stays narrower on purpose. It works inside Gmail rather than asking you to switch providers, updates its detection automatically instead of waiting on a manual release cycle, and strips both pixels and tracking parameters in links rather than only flagging a message after the fact. That will not stop every tracking method that exists anywhere online. It does mean the specific mechanism Flodesk relies on, an invisible pixel and a rewritten link with no sender side off switch, never gets the chance to fire in the first place.

The Bottom Line

Flodesk is the design forward face of an industry that runs on the same tracking playbook everywhere: a hidden pixel for opens, a rewritten link for clicks, and IP based logging that ties both back to your subscriber profile. What sets it apart is what it does not offer senders, a way to switch tracking off, which shifts the responsibility for protecting your privacy entirely onto your own inbox. Blocking the mechanism yourself, rather than hoping a beautifully designed newsletter chooses restraint, is the only version of that protection you can actually count on.