Mailfence Read Receipts: Does Mailfence Track Your Email?

Mailfence read receipts work the old fashioned way: the sender ticks a box, and you decide whether to answer. That puts Mailfence, the encrypted email service run by the Belgian company ContactOffice Group SA from Brussels, at the cautious end of the providers we have reviewed. Its webmail also refuses to load images hosted on outside servers until you click Yes, which stops most tracking pixels before they fire. So does Mailfence track you? We found no feature that reports your reading habits to senders or to Mailfence itself. We did find gaps worth knowing: no documented tracker list or image proxy, no protection for tracked links, and a privacy policy that lists the metadata Mailfence collects. We read Mailfence's full user documentation, its privacy policy, FAQ, knowledge base and transparency report on October 13, 2026.

Key Takeaways

• Mailfence's user documentation says a sender requests a read receipt by ticking a box, and the recipient sees a prompt asking whether to send one, with Yes and No buttons.
• Mailfence webmail does not display external images by default, because, in its own words, they can inform the sender that you have opened the message.
• Mailfence documents no tracker blocklist, no image proxy and no cleaning of tracked links, so a click on a tracked link or a manual image load still reports back to the sender.
• Mailfence's transparency report counts 21 requests for user identification between July 1 and December 31, 2025, and 9 identifications made under a valid Belgian court order.
• Gmail shows images automatically by default, so Gmail users need a setting change or an extension such as Gblock, Ugly Email, PixelBlock or Trocker to get similar protection.

Does Mailfence Have Read Receipts?

Yes, Mailfence lets you request a read receipt, and it lets you answer or refuse one. The Read receipts section of the Mailfence documentation is short and unusually honest about the feature's limits:

• How to ask: "When writing a message, select the box Read receipt under More (on the right)."
• What it proves: a read receipt "confirms that the message has been opened by the recipient, but it does not guarantee that the message was really read."
• Who decides: "the recipient is not obliged to send a read receipt, even if he/she has read the message. Their email software could also lack this feature."
• What comes back: "The read receipt is an email; its content changes according to the email software."

That description matches the Message Disposition Notification standard, RFC 8098, which says a Disposition-Notification-To header "is merely a request" and that recipients' mail programs "are always free to silently ignore such a request." Mailfence does not name the header in its documentation, but a receipt that arrives as an ordinary email, worded by the recipient's software, is how that standard works. Our explainer on how Gmail read receipts work covers the header in more detail. Mailfence also lists High priority and Read receipt among its webmail features in its feature comparison post.

What Happens When Someone Asks You for a Read Receipt?

Mailfence shows you a question and sends nothing until you answer it. According to the Mailfence documentation, this text appears on top of the message: "The sender of this message has asked to be notified when you read this message. Do you wish to send a read receipt?" You click Yes or No.

Clicking No is the private choice, and it costs nothing: the sender simply never hears back. Compare that with Gmail, where Google's read receipt help page says read receipts don't work with personal Gmail (@gmail.com) accounts at all, and with Mail.ru, which our Mail.ru read receipts review found sells the feature only to paying subscribers. All three treat the standard read receipt as something the reader controls. The open tracking you cannot refuse comes from images, and that is where Mailfence does most of its work.

Does Mailfence Block Tracking Pixels?

Mailfence blocks them indirectly, by refusing to load any external image until you approve it. The Display external images section of the documentation says images "hosted on a server and not directly in the message" are not displayed, because "external images can inform the sender that you have opened the message. They can deduce from that, for instance, that your email address is valid and active. This is useful information for a spammer."

• The prompt: when images are held back, Mailfence shows "Images on third-party Web servers are filtered. Display images in this email?" Clicking Yes loads every remote image in that message, including any tracking pixel.
• The override: a setting lets you show external images always. The documentation says to activate it only "if you wish external images to be always displayed." Leave it off.
• The default, restated: in a 2018 post on the Efail attacks, Mailfence wrote that remote content loads "only if the user chooses to load remote content, which is always disabled by default."

That is a blunter tool than the one Proton uses. Proton's tracker protection page says it removes known email trackers from messages that aren't end to end encrypted and, on the web app, strips known trackers from links. We found nothing comparable in Mailfence's documentation, knowledge base or blog. There is no mention of a tracker list, of an image proxy that would hide your IP address once you do click Yes, or of link cleaning. If a newsletter wraps every link in a redirect, Mailfence will not stop that click from being counted. Our Proton Mail read receipts review and Tuta review cover how those two handle the same problem. StartMail is stricter on receipts and refuses them in both directions, as our StartMail read receipts review explains.

Why Blocked Images Matter More for OpenPGP Users

For people who encrypt, a remote image can leak more than an open. Mailfence builds OpenPGP into its webmail, and its FAQ says non Mailfence users can read and reply to encrypted messages after decrypting them with their own OpenPGP private key. In May 2018, the Efail researchers showed that some mail programs could be tricked into sending decrypted text to an attacker inside the address of a remote image. Mailfence's Efail response said its webmail was not affected and gave a general warning to everyone else: "Disable HTML rendering and Remote Content Loading."

This is the chain most privacy reviews miss. The setting that stops a marketing pixel from logging your open is the same setting that shuts a known exfiltration channel for encrypted mail. If you are a journalist or an activist receiving OpenPGP mail, keep external images off in Mailfence and in any desktop program you connect to it, and treat the Display images prompt on an encrypted message from an unknown sender as a red flag rather than a convenience.

Does Mailfence Track You Itself?

Mailfence says it does not track or profile you, but it does log metadata. The Mailfence knowledge base lists "No tracking, no advertising" and "No third-party access to your data" among its privacy promises. The privacy policy, last updated December 21, 2021, spells out the rest:

• What it collects: "IP addresses, message-ID's, sender and recipient addresses, subjects, browser versions, countries and timestamps."
• What scans your mail: incoming and outgoing messages "are automatically analysed by our anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-abuse checking routines." Mailfence also builds a search index and says nothing from it is used to compile a profile.
• Analytics: "We do not use Google Analytics trackers." The static HTML of the Mailfence pages we downloaded loaded no Google Analytics, Matomo or Meta scripts.
• Cookies: Mailfence calls its cookies "authentication cookies" and not "tracking cookies."
• Retention: backups of deleted messages are kept for 45 days. After you close an account, data is deleted 30 days after a legal period that, the policy says, Belgian law sets at 365 days.

One thing we could not check is Mailfence's own newsletter. Mailfence does not say whether the privacy newsletter it promotes on its blog counts opens, and we did not subscribe to test it.

Who Can Get Your Mailfence Data?

Belgian courts can, and Mailfence publishes how often they do. The Mailfence transparency report says that between July 1 and December 31, 2025, Mailfence:

• received requests for user identification in 21 cases;
• provided user identification because of a valid Belgian court order in 9 cases;
• from launch to June 30, 2025, received 228 requests and provided identification in 105 cases.

Put another way, Mailfence identified a user in about 46 percent of all requests through mid 2025 and in 43 percent of those in the second half of 2025. The report counts only requests that come through a legal channel, and says that "the only legally binding requests are from Belgian courts." The FAQ is direct about the consequence: if a Belgian judge issues a court order, "we are legally obliged to comply by providing the requested data." Germany's Posteo, which collects no names at signup, released user information 0 times in 2025 and mailbox content twice, as our Posteo read receipts review details.

The warrant canary adds that Mailfence has never received a US National Security Letter or FISA order and has "never placed any backdoors in our hardware or software." The report promised its next update in July 2026. When we checked on October 13, 2026, it still showed the July to December 2025 figures. Remember what encryption does not cover: the same FAQ says that even with OpenPGP, providers know "to/from email addresses, messages subjects and sizes, IP addresses," which is exactly the kind of data an identification request is after.

How to Stop Read Receipts and Tracking in Mailfence

Mailfence's defaults already do most of the work. These steps close the gaps its documentation leaves open.

1. Answer No to read receipt prompts. Nothing is sent unless you click Yes.
2. Keep external images off. Check that the always display external images option in Settings is not active.
3. Say No to the image prompt on marketing mail. Clicking Yes on "Display images in this email?" lets every pixel in that message fire.
4. Hover before you click. Mailfence does not clean tracked links, so a click is counted even with images blocked.
5. Pick a desktop program that blocks remote content. Mailfence's FAQ says paid accounts get IMAPS on imap.mailfence.com, port 993. Thunderbird blocks remote images by default, as our Thunderbird review shows.
6. Keep sensitive words out of subject lines. Mailfence's FAQ lists message subjects among the metadata providers can see during encrypted exchanges, and its privacy policy lists subjects among the data it collects.

What This Means If You Read Mailfence Mail in Gmail

Once your mail lands in Gmail, Mailfence's protections are gone. The Mailfence documentation describes an Automatic forwarding field in Settings and warns that "the forwarded messages are automatically deleted" from Mailfence. Pulling mail into Gmail by POP is also closing: Google's notice on POP fetching says that "after the first quarter of 2026, this feature no longer supports new users," and existing users keep it until January 2027.

Gmail flips Mailfence's default. Google's image settings page says: "By default, when you get an email with an image, you'll see the image automatically." Gmail runs images through its own servers so senders "can't use image loading to get information about your computer or location," yet the same page admits: "Sometimes, senders may know whether you've opened an email that has an image." Your options:

• Gmail's own setting: choose Ask before displaying external images. It is the closest match to Mailfence's behavior, and like Mailfence it hides every image, wanted or not.
• Gblock: a paid Chrome extension for Gmail on desktop browsers, with a 30 day trial. It blocks known tracking pixels using a blocklist that updates automatically, strips tracking from links, and leaves other images alone. It does nothing inside Mailfence's own webmail or app.
• Ugly Email, PixelBlock and Trocker: other Gmail extensions aimed at the same pixels. Our Ugly Email vs PixelBlock vs Trocker comparison tests them side by side.

The Quick Answer

Does Mailfence have read receipts? Yes, and Mailfence says the recipient chooses Yes or No before anything goes back. Does Mailfence track you? We found no evidence that it reports your opens to senders or profiles you for ads. It hides external images by default, which stops pixels until you click to load them, though it does not clean tracked links or proxy images you choose to load. It keeps server metadata such as IP addresses and subjects, and it hands user identities to Belgian courts that order them, nine times in the second half of 2025 by its own count.