Is Medium Tracking Your Email? How to Block It

Medium email tracking is not a rumor or a theory. Medium's own engineers have written that when the Daily Digest lands in your inbox, "we know if the email was opened (thanks to a tracking pixel)" and "we know which posts were clicked." The digest is Medium's biggest distribution channel, sent to what the company calls 13+ million readers, so this is one of the most widely delivered tracked emails on the internet. We pulled apart four real Medium Digest emails, checked Medium's mail DNS, and requested the tracking endpoints ourselves on 18 September 2026. The answer is more nuanced than a simple yes: Medium watches closely, while the writers you follow mostly get aggregates.

Key Takeaways

• Medium's privacy policy, effective 24 March 2022, says web beacons are images "we use on our Services and in our emails to help deliver cookies, count visits, and understand usage."
• Four Medium Digest emails we examined, sent between December 2023 and June 2025, each carried two 1x1 open pixels: one at medium.com/_/stat?event=email.opened and one at u1823144.ct.sendgrid.net/wf/open.
• Every story link in those digests pointed straight to medium.com but carried a source parameter holding a 12 character ID that also appears in the recipient's email settings link, the send time, the story ID, and the story's slot in the email.
• Medium's Help Center describes only aggregate email metrics for writers, such as unique subscribers who opened or clicked a newsletter, and says new subscriber email addresses are no longer shared with writers.
• A Medium Engineering post from August 2025 says "several estimates suggest that 50 to 80%" of Medium's email open events are fake because of Apple Mail Privacy Protection, which does not apply to Gmail.

Does Medium Track Email Opens?

Yes. Medium tracks whether you open its emails and which stories you click, and it says so in two places. The Medium privacy policy defines web beacons as "pixel tags" or "clear GIFs" and states they are used "in our emails to help deliver cookies, count visits, and understand usage."

The engineering team is blunter. In Engineering stories behind the Medium Daily Digest Algorithm, Raphael Montaud explains that the pixel URL "is engineered in a way that when it's loaded, we know exactly which email loaded it and so we can record the email as 'opened'." The same post lists what Medium knows about each digest: whether it was opened, which posts were sent, and which posts were clicked.

Opens were not just counted. Until that 2025 rework, once Medium detected an opened digest, the post says "we will never send the posts it contains again to that reader." Your open shaped what you would be shown next.

How Medium Email Tracking Works

Medium email tracking uses two pixels in parallel plus tagged links, all delivered through SendGrid. We confirmed the pieces from DNS, from real messages, and from the live servers.

The sender: SendGrid

The SPF record for email.medium.com splits Medium's mail into eight named streams, including _digest-one, _digest-two, _letters and _transactional. Every IP address in those streams that we looked up in ARIN belongs to SendGrid, and the domain's MX record is mx.sendgrid.net.

Two pixels in one email

We examined four digest emails that Medium readers had published publicly in code repositories: one sent 28 December 2023 and three sent on consecutive mornings, 31 May to 2 June 2025. All four contained the same pair:

• Medium's own pixel: a width 1, height 1 image at medium.com/_/stat?event=email.opened&emailId=…, where emailId is a UUID unique to that single message.
• SendGrid's pixel: an image at u1823144.ct.sendgrid.net/wf/open?upn=…. SendGrid's tracking settings documentation says open tracking "adds an transparent one pixel image to the end of the email."

On 18 September 2026 the SendGrid host answered our request with 200 OK, Content-Type: image/gif and a 43 byte GIF89a image measuring 1 by 1 pixel, the classic tracking pixel. The medium.com stat endpoint returned a Cloudflare 403 page to our script, so we could not confirm its current response.

What the source parameter records

Medium does not use SendGrid's link rewriting. None of the four emails contained a SendGrid click redirect; about 75 links in each went straight to medium.com. Each link instead carries a long source= value. Here is one story link from the 31 May 2025 digest:

source=email-11f94a05cf16-1748674300240-digest.reader-ea34ece7503a-650a771d3c16----0-99------------------621a4261_d5ef_447e_ad58_f09e9475591f-1

• 11f94a05cf16: the same string sits in the path of that email's settings and unsubscribe link, medium.com/me/email-settings/11f94a05cf16/…, and stayed constant across all three 2025 emails. It is almost certainly the recipient's account ID.
• 1748674300240: a millisecond timestamp, 31 May 2025 at 06:51:40 UTC, the send time.
• digest.reader: the email type.
• 650a771d3c16: the story's ID, which matches the end of the story URL. The ID before it appears when the story sits in a publication.
• 0: the story's position in the email, counting 0 to 14 across the digest's 15 stories.
• 621a4261…: the same UUID as the emailId in the open pixel, which ties your click to your open.

We could not decode the second number after the position, which ranged from 73 to 109 across stories. Medium does not document the format.

What Does a Medium Writer See About You?

A Medium writer sees totals, not your personal open history, based on everything Medium documents. The Newsletter help page lists four publication newsletter stats: unique active subscribers, Sent, Opened ("Unique subscribers who opened an email") and Clicked ("Unique subscribers who clicked any link in an email").

For writers who email new stories to profile subscribers, the Audience stats page shows a subscriber list with each person's name and subscription date. It says nothing about opens per person. The email notifications page adds: "Email addresses are no longer shared with writers when readers subscribe to receive email notifications about stories from a writer." The Audience stats page dates that change to April 2025.

That is a real contrast with other newsletter platforms. As we found in our Substack email tracking investigation, Substack writers can pull up an individual subscriber's open and click history. On Medium, the detailed record stays with the platform.

What Does Medium Itself Learn?

Medium learns whether you opened each email, when, and which of its stories you clicked, all tied to your account. Medium's definition of an active newsletter subscriber on the Newsletter help page gives the game away: users "who have opened an email from you or any other Medium email or who have visited the website or app within the past 45 days." Medium evaluates your opens across all of its mail, not just one writer's.

Here is the contrarian part. Medium's Stats FAQ tells writers that story presentations exclude "places where we don't track, such as the digest emails." Read quickly, that sounds like the digest is untracked. It is not. The digest carries two open pixels and tagged links. The FAQ only means digest appearances do not feed a writer's presentation count, while Medium keeps the open and click data for its own recommendation system.

Once you click, the pixel matters less. If you are signed in, the story page itself logs you, since the privacy policy lists "reading history" and "links clicked" among the activity it collects.

How to Block Medium Email Tracking in Gmail

Cut the email you do not read, then stop the pixels in the email you keep. Our full guide on how to block email tracking in Gmail covers each method in more depth.

1. Trim Medium's email at the source. Per Medium's email preferences guide, open Settings, then the Notifications tab, and uncheck what you do not want, from Medium Digest to Recommended reading. Under the Account tab, Your Medium Digest frequency lets you drop from daily to weekly. Every digest footer also has "Unsubscribe from this type of email."
2. Turn off automatic images. Per Google's Gmail images help page: Settings, See all settings, the Images section, "Ask before displaying external images," then Save Changes. Google itself notes that "senders may know whether you've opened an email that has an image."
3. Strip the tag before you click. Everything from ?source= onward is optional; the story URL loads without it. Copy the link, delete the query string, and paste it into your browser.
4. Add a blocker for the messages you open with images on.

For how these extensions differ under the hood, see our breakdown of email tracker Chrome extensions.

What This Means for Your Inbox

Gmail users are the readers Medium can still measure accurately. The Medium Engineering post explains that Apple Mail Privacy Protection preloads messages on Apple's servers, so "pretty much all the emails from Apple users are marked as 'opened'," and estimates 50 to 80% of Medium's open events are fake. Gmail's image proxy works differently. It fetches images when you actually view the message, which is why Google's help page concedes senders may know you opened it. An iPhone reader sends noise. A Gmail reader sends signal.

That signal is also doubled. Two independent systems, Medium's stat endpoint and SendGrid's open tracker, log the same open. Blocking one domain is not enough; a blocklist has to cover both medium.com/_/stat and the ct.sendgrid.net open path, and it has to catch the next endpoint if Medium moves.

Put this in proportion, though. Medium is not a lead scoring machine like the marketing funnels we have examined, and writers do not get your personal open trail. The cost of an open is subtler: a permanent record at Medium of which subject lines and stories pulled you in, feeding the recommendations that decide what you read next.

What We Could Not Verify

Our message samples are all Medium Digests. We did not have a writer's "new story" notification or a publication newsletter to dissect, so we cannot confirm that those carry the same two pixels, though the newsletter stats can only report opens if something measures them. The SendGrid pixel host returns a GIF even for an invalid token, so our live test proves the endpoint works, not that Medium still uses that account today; the latest sample we saw was sent on 2 June 2025. Medium's Cloudflare blocked our requests to its stat endpoint. Finally, Medium does not document the source format, so our reading of each field comes from matching values across emails. Check your own digest with Gmail's Show original before assuming every detail applies to your account.