Is monday.com Tracking Your Email? How to Block It

You've probably heard of monday.com. Maybe your marketing team uses it for project boards, or your manager loves those colorful status columns. What you probably haven't heard is that monday.com also sells a CRM, and that CRM can quietly drop an invisible tracking pixel into emails sent from a connected Gmail account, the same kind of tracker cold email tools have used for years, just wearing a much more familiar logo.

That's the twist here. Niche sales tools tracking your opens is old news. A work management platform used by hundreds of thousands of companies doing the same thing, mostly without recipients ever suspecting it, is not.

Key Takeaways

• monday Sales CRM's Email Tracking feature embeds an invisible single pixel image in outgoing emails and notifies the sender the moment a recipient's email client loads it.
• The tracking applies only to messages sent through monday's own compose window using a connected Gmail or Outlook account, not to every email that account ever sends elsewhere.
• monday.com reported more than 250,000 paying customers as of its most recent annual filing, and Email Tracking is a simple toggle sales teams often flip on as a team wide default.
• Recipients see nothing unusual in their inbox and have no way to know or consent to being tracked, since the pixel is invisible by design.
• Gblock blocks monday.com's tracking pixel from loading inside Gmail, so the sender's dashboard shows no "Seen" status while your inbox looks and works exactly the same.

What Is monday Sales CRM's Email Tracking Feature?

monday Sales CRM is the sales pipeline product built on top of monday.com's broader work management platform. It connects to a rep's Gmail or Outlook account so they can send, receive, and log emails without ever leaving the CRM interface. Buried inside that integration is a checkbox labeled "Email Tracking," which a rep ticks at the bottom of the email composer before hitting send.

Once it's on, monday.com's mass email tracking dashboard shows a delivery rate and an "Opened" percentage for every batch sent, counted as unique opens per recipient. For one to one emails, the sender gets a real time notification the instant a message is opened, plus a running count of how many times it's been reopened. None of that data reaches you. It only reaches the person who hit send.

How Does the Tracking Pixel Actually Work?

The mechanism is unglamorous and well documented: a single transparent pixel, invisible to the human eye, gets embedded in the body of the email as an image tag pointing to a monday.com tracking server. Gmail (or whichever client you use) requests that image the moment you open the message and your client renders images automatically. The request itself, not anything you click or type, is what tells monday.com's servers the email was opened, and roughly when.

This is the same technique marketing platforms and outbound sales tools have used for over a decade. What's different is the branding wrapped around it. When Salesforce or HubSpot tracks your opens, most recipients have at least heard the term "sales CRM email tracker" and half expect it. When monday.com does it, the average recipient's mental model of the company is project boards and Gantt charts, not a silent read receipt riding along in their inbox.

Does monday.com Track Everything You Send From Gmail?

No, and this distinction matters. monday.com's tracking is tied to the send button inside its own composer, not to the Gmail or Outlook account as a whole. According to monday's own support documentation on how Emails & Activities work, the integration lets a rep send and receive mail through their connected inbox from inside monday, and tracking only fires on messages that go out through that specific workflow with the toggle checked.

If the same rep opens Gmail directly in a browser tab and fires off a normal message the old fashioned way, monday.com never sees it and never tracks it. The surveillance is scoped to a workflow, not to a person's entire email history. That's a meaningfully narrower claim than "monday.com watches everything you send," and it's worth being precise about, since overstating the scope is exactly the kind of inaccuracy that undermines otherwise legitimate privacy concerns.

Why Recipients Never Know They're Being Watched

Here's the part that should bother you regardless of scope: the recipient side of this equation gets zero visibility. Email Tracking is opt in for the sender and invisible to everyone else. A sales manager can turn it on as a team default in settings once, and every rep on that team starts tracking opens without a single additional click, and without a single prospect or customer ever being told.

That asymmetry is the whole business model of tracking pixels. You can learn to spot some of the tells, a message with no visible images that still seems to "know" you opened it is a common one, but most people never think to look, because the email looks completely ordinary. If you want to see what a tracked message actually contains, our guide on how to detect email tracking pixels in Gmail walks through the source code inspection that reveals a hidden pixel.

Why Email Users Should Care

It's tempting to file this under "sales tools do sales things" and move on, but the scale changes the calculus. monday.com isn't a niche outbound tool used by a handful of SDR teams, it reported over 250,000 paying customers in its most recent annual filing, spanning manufacturing, agencies, nonprofits, HR teams, and plenty of small businesses that never think of themselves as running a "CRM." If even a fraction of those workspaces have Email Tracking switched on as a team default, that's a large and largely invisible pool of everyday Gmail users being read tracked by an account manager, recruiter, or vendor they'd never guess was watching.

This is also why monday.com deserves its own scrutiny rather than getting lumped in with tools like HubSpot or Pipedrive that recipients already associate with sales tracking. A recruiter emailing you through monday's CRM doesn't look or feel like a cold outreach platform. It looks like a normal email from a normal person, which is exactly why the pixel inside it goes unnoticed.

How to Check If monday.com Is Tracking You Right Now

You don't need to take anyone's word for it. Three concrete checks:

1. Inspect the email source. In Gmail, open the suspect message, click the three dot menu, and select "Show original." Search the raw text for monday.com alongside an <img> tag with 1x1 dimensions, that's the pixel.
2. Check for a matching sender pattern. If the same person or company always seems to text or call you shortly after you open their email, and there's no obvious reason they'd know that, tracking is a reasonable explanation.
3. Block it and watch what happens. Install a tracking pixel blocker, then ask the sender (if you have a friendly relationship) whether their dashboard still shows the email as opened. If it doesn't, the blocker is working. For a full rundown of detection and blocking methods, see our guide on how to block email tracking in Gmail.

Gblock vs. Ugly Email vs. PixelBlock vs. Trocker: What Actually Blocks monday.com's Pixel

Several free extensions promise to stop pixels like monday.com's, and it's worth being straightforward about what each one really does rather than treating them as interchangeable, as we cover in more depth in our Ugly Email vs. PixelBlock vs. Trocker comparison.

• Ugly Email: Flags tracked messages with a small eye icon before you open them, so you know a pixel is present. It's a warning system more than a blocker, and its usefulness depends on how current its tracker signatures stay.
• PixelBlock: Blocks pixels in Gmail and marks blocked attempts with an icon, but it has gone through stretches of inconsistent updates, which can leave gaps for newer trackers on platforms like monday's CRM.
• Trocker: The broadest of the free options, working across Gmail, Outlook.com, and Yahoo Mail, blocking both pixels and tracked links with a visible shield indicator.
• Gblock: Runs natively inside Gmail's own interface with an auto updating blocklist, so it doesn't need a manual signature update to catch a CRM tool like monday.com once its tracking domains are identified. It also strips tracking links outright rather than just flagging them, and blocks 200+ trackers across CRMs, marketing platforms, and sales tools by default. See our full roundup of email tracker blocker extensions for a side by side look at coverage and setup.

None of these are bad choices if monday.com is the only tracker on your radar. Where Gblock's approach differs is in not requiring you to keep checking whether your blocker still recognizes a given CRM's pixel months from now, that upkeep runs in the background instead of falling on you.

The Bottom Line

monday.com's Email Tracking isn't a hidden exploit or a bug, it's a documented, deliberate feature aimed at helping sales and account teams know when to follow up. But it ships as an easy toggle, applies without any signal to the person on the receiving end, and rides inside a brand most people associate with project boards, not surveillance. Once Gblock blocks the pixel, the sender's dashboard simply shows no "Seen" status, with no way to tell whether that means you haven't opened the email yet or you opened it and the tracker never got to fire. Either way, that's information about your reading habits that stays yours.