Is Mailshake Tracking Your Email? How to Block It

If a sales rep's cold email seems to know the moment you opened it, or exactly which link you clicked, Mailshake's tracking pixel is a likely reason. Founded in 2017 and still positioned squarely at small sales development teams, Mailshake has quietly tracked millions of recipients who never installed anything and were never asked.

Key Takeaways

• Mailshake embeds a 1x1 tracking pixel in the header or footer of campaign emails to log opens, and rewrites links separately to log clicks.
• Mailshake's own documentation warns senders the tracking pixel "can affect deliverability rates" and recommends a custom tracking domain to reduce the damage — an admission that the mechanism itself is intrusive enough to trip spam filters.
• Mailshake reports more than 20,000 customers and says it is trusted by sales teams at over 100,000 companies, most of them small SDR teams of one to ten people emailing prospects directly.
• Gblock blocks Mailshake's tracking pixel and unwraps its tracked links, so recipients stop feeding data back to Mailshake's dashboard without changing anything about how they read email.

What Is Mailshake?

Mailshake is a sales engagement platform built around cold email campaigns, combining email sequencing with a phone dialer, a prospect data finder, and multichannel outreach cadences. It has positioned itself closer to enterprise tools like Outreach and Salesloft than to newer, lighter cold email tools, aiming specifically at traditional SDR teams working inside established CRM workflows. That focus means most Mailshake emails arrive from a real rep's inbox, styled and sent to look exactly like an ordinary Gmail message, with the tracking layer completely invisible to the person receiving it.

Because Mailshake targets small teams rather than enterprise marketing departments, its emails skew toward the kind of one to one seeming outreach that recipients are least likely to expect is instrumented. For more on how tools like this integrate with Gmail, see our guide to email tracker Chrome extensions.

Does Mailshake Track When You Open and Click Emails?

Yes. According to Mailshake's own help documentation, opens are tracked using "an Email Tracking Pixel," described as "a 1x1 pixel embedded in an email, which can be in the header or footer." When your email client loads that pixel, the request is logged as an open on the sender's campaign dashboard. Clicks are tracked separately, through rewritten links that route through Mailshake's servers before redirecting to the real destination, letting the sender see exactly which link in the email you followed.

What sets Mailshake apart is how candid its own documentation is about the tracking pixel's downside — not for the recipient, but for the sender. Mailshake's docs state plainly that "email servers will pick up on this pixel, which can affect deliverability rates," and recommend senders configure a custom tracking domain specifically to make the pixel less detectable by spam filtering systems. In other words, Mailshake's own engineering team treats the pixel as risky enough to trip automated abuse detection, and the suggested fix is to disguise it better rather than remove it.

What Does a Mailshake Sender See About You?

Tracking is enabled per campaign, with a toggle the sender sets when building it, and once active it applies to every recipient in that campaign automatically. The sender's dashboard shows open counts and click counts per recipient, letting them see at a glance which prospects engaged and which did not — informing who gets a follow up call, a second email, or gets dropped from the sequence entirely.

Because Mailshake is built for small SDR teams running high volume outreach, this data often feeds directly into next step decisions made the same day: a rep scanning a list of 200 sent emails can see instantly which ones opened and clicked, and prioritize calls accordingly — a workflow built entirely on signals recipients never agreed to generate.

How Do I Stop Mailshake From Tracking My Emails?

If you send campaigns through Mailshake yourself, you can turn tracking off when you set up the campaign. Most people encountering this, however, are on the receiving end of a Mailshake tracked cold email with no access to that toggle at all. For recipients, there are three realistic options.

• Gblock: Intercepts Mailshake's tracking pixel before it can report an open, and unwraps Mailshake's rewritten links so clicks route to the real destination without ever touching Mailshake's click server. Mailshake's tracking domains are covered automatically alongside 200+ other trackers, with nothing to configure.
• Disable remote images in Gmail: Go to Gmail Settings, then General, then Images, and select "Ask before displaying external images." This stops the open pixel from loading, but blocks every image in every email until manually approved, and does nothing to stop tracked links.
• Apple Mail with Mail Privacy Protection: On iOS or macOS, Apple's Mail Privacy Protection preloads images through Apple's proxy, masking your IP and firing the pixel at a randomized time rather than when you actually read the message. This only covers opens inside Apple Mail, does not stop click tracking, and has no effect on Gmail accessed through a browser.

For the full breakdown of these approaches and more, see our complete guide on how to block email tracking in Gmail.

Mailshake Tracking Blockers Compared: Gblock vs. Ugly Email vs. PixelBlock vs. Trocker vs. Proton vs. HEY

Several tools claim to stop cold email trackers like Mailshake's, and the differences matter once click tracking is part of the picture.

• Ugly Email: A free Gmail extension that flags tracked messages with an eye icon so you know a pixel is present. It warns rather than reliably blocks, and does not address tracked links.
• PixelBlock: Blocks pixels in Gmail with a red icon marking blocked attempts, though maintenance has lagged at times and it leaves rewritten links untouched.
• Trocker: The most complete of the free options — blocks pixels, flags tracked links, and works across several webmail providers beyond Gmail.
• Proton Mail: Blocks remote content and tracking pixels by default at the client level, but requires migrating your email to Proton's service.
• HEY: Flags "Spy Pixel Blocked" automatically, but like Proton it means leaving Gmail behind rather than protecting the account you already use.
• Gblock: Runs inside Gmail with an auto updating blocklist covering Mailshake's tracking domains alongside 200+ other sales tools, plus tracking link stripping so a Mailshake rewritten link resolves to its real destination. No migration, no manual upkeep.

For a deeper comparison of the free blocker options, see our Ugly Email vs. PixelBlock vs. Trocker breakdown.

Does Gblock Block Mailshake's Tracking Pixel?

Yes. Gblock's blocklist covers the domains Mailshake uses for both pixel based open tracking and link based click tracking, including custom tracking domains senders configure to make the pixel harder for spam filters to spot. When a Mailshake email reaches your Gmail inbox, Gblock intercepts the pixel and unwraps tracked links before you click them, so Mailshake's dashboard logs neither an open nor a click. Everything else about the email — legitimate images, real links, formatting — stays exactly as sent.

Gblock's blocklist updates automatically as Mailshake and similar platforms rotate tracking domains, so coverage does not depend on you keeping up with it. If you are evaluating comparable sales engagement platforms, our guide on whether Outreach is tracking your email covers a direct Mailshake competitor with a similar customer base.

The Bottom Line

Mailshake's tracking is a documented, intentional feature meant to help SDR teams prioritize follow ups — not a hidden exploit — but Mailshake's own documentation treats the pixel as risky enough to recommend disguising it from spam filters, while never disclosing it to the recipients it is actually tracking. Blocking the pixel and its tracked links does not change the email you receive; it only removes the silent readout of when you opened it and what you clicked.

Sources: Mailshake's Email Pixel Tracking documentation and Mailshake's product site.