Is Mailtrack Safe? How to Block It in Gmail (2026)

If you have ever received a sales email and noticed the sender called you fifteen minutes after you opened it, Mailtrack is the most common explanation. The extension shows the sender a familiar pair of check marks in the Sent folder — one grey check when the email is sent, two blue checks when the email is opened. The mechanism behind the second check is a tracking pixel, and that pixel is the thing recipients can choose to block.

Key Takeaways

• Mailtrack works by embedding a 1x1 invisible tracking pixel inside every email a Mailtrack user sends, so the sender sees opens, the time of opening, the recipient's approximate location based on IP, and the device used.
• Mailtrack states it does not read, store, or sell the contents of your emails — but the open event metadata it generates can be sold to a sender's CRM, used to grade you as a hot lead, or stored on Mailtrack's own analytics infrastructure.
• Gmail's image proxy hides the recipient's true IP from the sender by routing image requests through Google, but it still reports the open back — so Mailtrack continues to register two blue checks unless the recipient actively blocks the pixel.
• The reliable way to stop Mailtrack on the recipient side is a Chrome extension that intercepts tracking pixels before they load, or Gmail's manual "ask before displaying external images" setting.
• Gblock is a free Chrome extension built specifically to block Mailtrack and every other tracking pixel inside Gmail without breaking the rest of your inbox.

What Does Mailtrack Actually Collect?

Mailtrack is a Chrome extension and Gmail add on that gives the sender a real time signal whenever you open an email they sent. The technical mechanism is straightforward: when a Mailtrack user clicks Send, the extension rewrites the outgoing HTML to include a remote image hosted on Mailtrack's tracking domain. The image is one pixel by one pixel, transparent, and invisible to a human reader. The moment your email client loads that image, Mailtrack's server logs the request — and now the sender has the data.

The fields the sender sees in their dashboard typically include: that the email was opened, the timestamp of the first open, the approximate location of the recipient based on the IP address that requested the image, the device or email client type, and the number of opens (each new open after the first is logged as another request). Mailtrack also offers click tracking on links by rewriting every URL in the outgoing email to route through Mailtrack first.

Mailtrack publicly states that it does not read the contents of your messages, does not store the body of emails it sends, and does not sell email addresses to third parties. Those claims are about the sender's data, not the recipient's. The open event metadata generated about the recipient is collected, processed, and surfaced to the sender by design.

Is Mailtrack Safe for the Sender?

For the sender, Mailtrack is generally safe. The extension has a long track record, a reasonably clear privacy policy, and a paid tier that removes the company's branding from outbound emails. Mailtrack has not appeared on any major Chrome Web Store malware purge and the codebase has not been reported as collecting email contents.

There are still considerations even on the sender side. Every email you send with Mailtrack appends an invisible image hosted on Mailtrack's infrastructure to your message. That alters the email's HTML in a way that some recipients' spam filters can flag, and modern enterprise email gateways are increasingly able to identify and strip known tracking pixel domains. If you send to a privacy aware audience, the open rate Mailtrack reports will systematically understate your real engagement.

Is Mailtrack Safe for the Recipient?

For the recipient, Mailtrack is the same surveillance any tracking pixel performs. The sender learns when you read their email, roughly where you were at the time, and what device you read it on. That information is harmless in social contexts but consequential in commercial ones. Sales teams use Mailtrack opens as a buying signal — the sender knows the optimal time to call you back, and your job application or salary negotiation email becomes legible to the other side in real time.

In recruiting, the pattern is so reliable that hiring managers explicitly look at open patterns to gauge candidate interest. In B2B sales, opens drive the next outreach. In personal emails, the dynamic shifts in subtler ways — the friend who knows you read their message but did not reply.

How to Block Mailtrack in Gmail

Three approaches work. Each has different ergonomic costs.

• Install Gblock. Gblock is a free Chrome extension that detects tracking pixels — including the ones Mailtrack uses — and blocks them before they load. It works automatically on every email you open in Gmail and does not require you to remember to change any settings. The sender's Mailtrack dashboard never sees the open.
• Turn off automatic image loading in Gmail. Open Gmail Settings, scroll to Images, and choose "Ask before displaying external images". This stops Gmail from loading any remote image (including the Mailtrack pixel) until you manually click. The downside is that legitimate images in newsletters and trusted senders also stop loading until you click each one.
• Read in plain text mode. Some email clients support a plain text view that strips HTML entirely. The pixel never loads because the HTML never renders. The downside is that every email you read looks like 1995.

Gblock is built specifically to solve the Mailtrack and pixel tracking problem inside Gmail without making the rest of your inbox unpleasant to use. It also blocks tracking pixels from other email tools like Yesware, HubSpot Sales, Streak, Mixmax, Bananatag, Snov, and any custom pixel a sender has rolled themselves. For a broader walkthrough of the alternatives, see our guide on how to block email tracking in Gmail and the comparison of email tracker Chrome extensions and how to block them. If Mailtrack's "two blue checks" are what brought you here, our explainer on how Gmail read receipts really work and our guide to spotting Streak, Yesware, and HubSpot tracking in your Gmail go deeper.

Mailtrack Alternatives if You Are the Sender

If you came to this page from the sender side and want a comparable tool, the main Mailtrack competitors are Yesware, HubSpot Sales, Streak, Mixmax, Saleshandy, and Bananatag — all of which use the same tracking pixel approach with slightly different dashboards and pricing. The honest version of this comparison: each of these tools will work against recipients who do not run a tracking pixel blocker, and none of them will work against recipients who do. The trend over time is more recipients running blockers, so the reported open rates from all of these tools have been systematically deflating since 2022.

A growing number of senders have switched to explicit signals — asking for a reply rather than measuring an open — because the open metric has become unreliable for the audiences who matter most.

The Quick Answer

Yes, Mailtrack is safe in the antivirus sense — it is not malware. No, Mailtrack is not safe for the recipient in the privacy sense — every email a Mailtrack user sends to you reports your reading behavior back to the sender. If you do not want to be tracked, the practical answer is to block the pixel before it loads. Gblock is the fastest way to do that in Gmail. Mailtrack is not the only culprit, either: see is GMass tracking your email and how to block it.