Is Moosend Tracking Your Email? How to Block It

Moosend email tracking is on by default, and as a recipient you were never asked. Open a Moosend newsletter in Gmail and the platform records the moment you did it, the device you used, and the city your IP address resolves to. Its own help documentation lays this out plainly, including a "Top Locations" map of where opens came from and a report showing exactly which recipient clicked which link. There is a small irony worth naming up front: Moosend's marketing blog tells readers that tracking pixels "can't be blocked." That is not true, and this guide walks through exactly how to block Moosend tracking yourself.

Key Takeaways

• Moosend's documentation describes a "Top Locations" map showing the number of total opens by country and city, derived from your IP address at the moment the tracking pixel loads.
• Moosend keeps statistics in the Opened and Clicked tabs for 180 days and the Sent tab for 90 days, per its own knowledge base.
• Moosend's "Recipient clicks" report shows a sender how each individual recipient reacted to each specific link, so click data is per person, not just aggregate.
• Moosend's site tracking script fires its Identify event when a recipient clicks a newsletter link, which converts an anonymous website visitor into a named contact profile tied to your email address.
• Constant Contact acquired Moosend from Sitecore on June 6, 2025, so the platform behind these newsletters is now part of one of the largest SMB email providers in the world.

What Is Moosend and Who Uses It?

Moosend is an email marketing and automation platform aimed largely at small businesses and ecommerce stores, known for a cheap entry tier that makes it popular with shops too small to justify enterprise tooling. Ownership has moved twice in recent years. Sitecore bought Moosend in 2021 and rebranded it internally as Sitecore Send, then Constant Contact acquired Moosend from Sitecore on June 6, 2025, citing Moosend's white label capabilities and its strength in the EMEA region.

That white label detail matters more than it sounds. Because agencies and platforms resell Moosend under their own branding, and because senders can point a custom domain at their account, the newsletter tracking you the most persistently may never say "Moosend" anywhere you can see it. Moosend's customer list also reaches well past small shops, including Domino's and Sephora, so this is not a niche plugin you can safely ignore.

Does Moosend Track Email Opens?

Yes. Moosend tracks opens the same way nearly every email service provider does, with a 1x1 transparent image embedded in the HTML body of the message. The image is invisible, weighs almost nothing, and carries a unique identifier tied to you and that specific campaign. When Gmail renders the message and fetches that image, the request itself is the open event. Nothing else is required from you. You do not have to click, reply, scroll, or interact in any way.

Moosend's own guide to email tracking describes tracking pixels as "tiny snippets of code a tracking server loads in order to gather information about your subscribers," and compares them to cookies with one telling difference: "unlike them, tracking pixels can't be blocked." That claim is the marketing pitch, not a technical fact. A pixel only reports back if your client actually requests it, which is precisely the step a blocker removes. If you want the mechanics in more depth, our guide on how to detect email tracking pixels in Gmail covers the same technique across providers.

What Does Moosend Record When You Open an Email?

Moosend's documentation is unusually candid about the location piece. Its page on tracking activity by location describes a "Top Locations" widget as "a map with the number of total opens originating from specific locations," alongside "a list of countries and cities where your recipients are located, ordered from the most opens to the least." Senders hover over a country or city on that map to pull its statistics.

Location like this is derived from the IP address attached to the pixel request, and Moosend says as much through its own caveat on that page: the location "might not be accurate if you use a VPN connection, if your IP address changes, or if you use a Gmail or Google Workspace (G Suite) account." Keep that Gmail exception in mind, because it becomes important later.

The retention window is documented too. Moosend's page on tracking recipient activity states that statistics in the Sent tab are kept for 90 days and statistics in the Opened and Clicked tabs are kept for 180 days. Senders can drill into a single subscriber's activity across one campaign or across every campaign that person has received, then download it as a PDF or export it to CSV. Your reading history does not stay inside a dashboard. It leaves as a spreadsheet.

How Does Moosend Click Tracking Work?

Click tracking is a second, separate mechanism. Moosend rewrites the links in a campaign so they route through its own tracking infrastructure first, log the click against your subscriber record, then redirect your browser onward to the destination you actually wanted. The round trip takes milliseconds and gives no visible sign that it happened.

Moosend's documentation on tracking link clicks lays out three views a sender gets: a "Click map" showing the newsletter content with bubbles indicating how many clicks each link received, a "Performance per link" chart breaking out Unique Clicks and Total Clicks, and "Recipient clicks," which the docs describe as showing "how each recipient reacted to each specific link inside your campaign." That last one is the part people underestimate. Click data is not anonymised aggregate statistics. It is attributed to you by name.

Moosend does not publish the exact format of its redirect URLs, and senders can mask them behind a custom domain anyway, so do not rely on spotting a single known domain. The dependable tell is simpler: the destination in the link does not match the words you are clicking. Our breakdown of email link wrapping and click tracking explains why this pattern is nearly universal across providers.

How Does Moosend Link Your Inbox to Your Browsing?

This is where Moosend goes further than a plain newsletter tool, and where most coverage stops short. Moosend ships a JavaScript site tracking library that senders install on their store. Its public tracking library on GitHub records page views, product views, logins, add to cart events, and completed orders, and identifies a visitor through a call that takes an email address as the primary key.

Here is the connection that makes email the hinge. Moosend's documentation on tracking the actions of a website visitor states that identification happens either through JavaScript or "when recipients click newsletter links." One click from a Moosend email is enough to convert an anonymous browser session into a named profile. Everything you browse afterwards on that store, every product you look at and abandon, attaches to your email address and feeds segmentation and automation rules. The pixel tells them you read it. The link tells them who is doing the browsing.

How Can You Tell If a Moosend Email Is Tracking You?

You can inspect any suspicious newsletter yourself in about thirty seconds:

• Open the message in Gmail, click the three dot menu at the top right of the message, and choose Show original.
• Search the raw source for <img and look for an image with width and height of 1, or styling that hides it. A tracking pixel typically looks like <img src="https://…/track/open?id=a1b2c3" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" /> with a long unique identifier in the URL.
• Search for moosend directly. Senders using the default platform domain will show a .moosend.com host, though anyone on a custom domain will not.
• Compare each href against the visible link text. If a button that reads "Shop the sale" points somewhere that is not the shop's own domain, the click is being logged on the way through.

Doing this by hand is a fine way to confirm a hunch once. It is a poor daily habit, which is why detection extensions that flag tracked messages automatically exist.

How Do You Block Moosend Tracking in Gmail?

There is no recipient side opt out inside Moosend. The tracking toggle belongs to the sender, so blocking has to happen in your own client, before the pixel request leaves your browser. Four approaches are worth weighing honestly.

Gmail's "Ask before displaying external images"

In Gmail, go to Settings, then General, then Images, and choose "Ask before displaying external images." Google documents this control in its official help page on images in Gmail. It genuinely stops the pixel from firing, but it also hides every legitimate image in every message until you approve it one at a time.

Understand what Gmail's default already does and does not do. Gmail proxies remote images through Google's servers, which is why Moosend's own location documentation warns that location "might not be accurate… if you use a Gmail or Google Workspace (G Suite) account." The proxy hides your real IP address, so the city on that Top Locations map may be wrong. It does not stop the open from being recorded. Moosend still sees that the message was opened, and when.

Gblock

Gblock runs inside Gmail and intercepts tracking pixel requests before they load, so the open event never registers, while ordinary images in your newsletters keep displaying normally. Its blocklist updates automatically rather than shipping as a fixed list, which matters against a platform like Moosend where senders can move tracking behind their own custom domains. It also strips known tracking parameters from links, covering the click side as well as the open. It is not a defence against every form of tracking on the web, and it does not claim to be.

Other extensions and privacy first mail providers

Ugly Email and PixelBlock were the early Gmail tools here and still flag tracked messages usefully, though both lean on manually maintained domain lists. Trocker works across browsers with a similar approach. Proton Mail and HEY solve it from a different direction, proxying or stripping remote content before a message ever reaches you, at the cost of leaving Gmail behind. We compare these directly in our review of Ugly Email, PixelBlock and Trocker alternatives.

What Can Moosend Senders Still See After You Block It?

Blocking is not invisibility, and it helps to be precise about the boundary. Once the pixel is blocked, a sender loses the open timestamp, the repeat open count, the device and client fingerprint carried in the request, and your entry on that Top Locations map. Their dashboard will show you as never having opened the message, which is exactly the point. Strip the click tracking too and the "Recipient clicks" report has nothing to attribute to you.

What senders keep is everything that never depended on you loading anything: your email address, the fact the message was delivered rather than bounced, whether you unsubscribed, and any purchase or account data you gave them directly. If you log into their store, they know it is you regardless of any extension. Blocking the pixel removes the surveillance you never consented to; it does not erase the relationship you chose. Our guide on blocking spy pixels in Gmail covers the same boundary in more detail.

One practical note. Because Moosend keeps Opened and Clicked statistics for 180 days, anything already collected before you install a blocker stays on file for roughly six months. Blocking is forward looking, so the sooner it is in place, the shorter the record.

The Bottom Line

Moosend is not doing anything the rest of the industry does not do. It embeds a pixel, rewrites the links, keeps the results for six months, and ties the whole thing to a persistent contact profile that follows you onto the sender's website the instant you click. What makes it worth calling out is the confidence of that line in its own blog, the one telling readers tracking pixels "can't be blocked." A pixel is just an image request. Refuse to make the request and there is nothing to report. That is the entire trick, and it takes one setting or one extension to pull off.

Sources: Moosend Docs — Track activity by location · Moosend Docs — Track link clicks · Moosend Docs — Track recipient activity · Moosend Docs — Tracking the actions of a website visitor · Moosend website tracking library (GitHub) · Moosend Blog — Email Tracking guide · CMSWire — Constant Contact Acquires Moosend from Sitecore · Google — Images in Gmail