Is Ortto Tracking Your Email? How to Block It

Most marketing platforms describe their tracking in careful, bloodless language. Ortto does something unusual: it sells the tracking as a feature that defeats your defences, in roughly those words, on a public page. If you want to block Ortto tracking, the useful starting point is that Ortto has already published how it works.

Key Takeaways

• Ortto's open tracking documentation states that "both open and click tracking are turned on by default for new emails."
• Ortto can append a SHA-256 hash of your email address to links you click as a user_email parameter, which the sender's analytics tools use to identify you.
• If images never load, Ortto can still record an open when you click a link, so blocking the pixel alone leaves a second route open.
• Ortto claims its Checkmate tracking "can't be blocked by AdBlock, email servers and browsers," while its help centre describes the real mechanism: a first party subdomain ad blockers are "less likely to block."
• Ortto's live tracking script still calls hosts named after Autopilot, the company's identity before its 2022 rebrand.

Does Ortto Track Email Opens and Clicks?

Yes to both, and both are on unless the sender turns them off. Ortto's how email opens are tracked page says the system "includes a tiny, invisible 1x1 pixel image in each email you send," and that when you load images, "this image is retrieved from our servers, registering the open."

Clicks follow the industry pattern. Per Ortto's link click documentation, each link is replaced by "a unique URL" that is "hosted by us" and records "the link clicked, the email name, the contact who clicked, and more." The redirect happens, in Ortto's phrasing, "without the contact noticing."

Now the detail most people miss. The same page notes that "if images aren't loaded, an open may still be recorded if the contact clicks a link in the email." Suppress the pixel, click anything, and the open lands anyway, backfilled from the redirect. That makes a pixel only defence a partial one here, and it is why our explainer on how tracking links get wrapped and rewritten matters more for Ortto than for a plain newsletter.

What Domain Serves Ortto's Tracking Pixel?

We could not verify the exact default host from Ortto's documentation, and we will not invent one. The help centre says only that the pixel is "retrieved from our servers" and that a wrapped link is "hosted by us." No default hostname appears on either page.

The surrounding infrastructure is verifiable, and more informative than a single hostname. We pulled the TLS certificate served by cdn3l.ink and found one certificate covering seven names: static.ap3prod.com, s.ortto-prod.com, cdneu.net, cdn3l.ink, cdnau.net, s.autopilotapp.com and cdn2l.ink. One estate, several unrelated looking brands. Ortto's live script also calls capture-api.autopilotapp.com, and its docs name @autopilotmail.com as the default sending address.

Several of those still carry the Autopilot name, four years after the rebrand, making Ortto the second platform in this series whose tracking answers on its predecessor's plumbing, after Bloomreach serving its pixel from cdn.exponea.com. Acquisitions change the logo. They rarely change the DNS.

For a recipient, though, the indicator that matters most is the sender's own tracking subdomain. Ortto's custom domains documentation confirms that "links in your emails (e.g., 'Read more') redirect through your tracking subdomain (e.g., track.yourbrand.com)." Ortto runs this on itself: its own site tracks visitors from t.ortto.com.

Why Is There a Hash of Your Email Address in the Link?

Because Ortto puts it there deliberately, to carry your identity out of the inbox and into the sender's website analytics. The email campaign setup documentation is explicit: the feature "adds a SHA-256 hash of the recipient's email address to any clicked links" as a user_email parameter, "allowing you to link clicks to specific users using your analytics tools."

Hashing sounds protective. Here it is not. SHA-256 is deterministic, so your address always produces the same 64 character string, making it a permanent identifier rather than an anonymised one. It is also cheap to reverse when the input is a list of known addresses. In a plain Python loop on a laptop we hashed roughly three million candidate addresses per second, so any party already holding an email list can match your user_email value back to you before the page finishes rendering.

Ortto's documentation on preventing tracking for specific URLs does offer two suppression tags, #orttonochange and #orttonotrack, but the marketer types both into their own email and both are stripped before it reaches you.

What This Means for Your Inbox

Ortto is not only a mailer. It is a customer data platform with a website tag, and the pixel is designed to be one event inside a larger file. The Ortto tracking script sets a session cookie named ap3c with a 365 day lifetime, and documents an ap3c.track call that ties a browsing session to an email address directly.

The join is not theoretical. Your open supplies a timestamp. Your click supplies a hashed address in the URL and a session cookie in your browser. From that moment the pages you read on the sender's site are filed under the same person who opened the newsletter at 7:14 on a Tuesday. It is the architecture we described in what Customer.io records about you, and it is why an open inside a customer data platform is a different object from an open inside a newsletter tool. None of it comes with a recipient side control: every toggle above belongs to the sender, and unsubscribing leaves every other Ortto customer's pixel exactly where it was.

Can Ortto Tracking Really Not Be Blocked?

Ortto's marketing says no. Its tracking page states: "Unlike universal tracking scripts, Checkmate tracking can't be blocked by AdBlock, email servers and browsers." Strong words for a claim the company's own help centre then explains away. Here is the mechanism, from the custom domains page: a tracking subdomain "ensures that tracking data can be gathered and processed seamlessly, even if visitors use ad blocker extensions. The ad blocker recognizes the tracking code as belonging to the webpage (since the domain names match) and is less likely to block it."

Read those together and the claim shrinks. Nothing here is unblockable technology. It is a CNAME record that makes third party tracking wear a first party costume, and Ortto's own words are "less likely to block," not cannot block. Most coverage of platforms like this fixates on how much data they collect. The more telling fact about Ortto is that it has published, in plain English, that its headline advantage is defeating the privacy tools you already chose to install.

The claim has a second hole Ortto concedes elsewhere. Its open tracking page admits that Apple Mail Privacy Protection preloads images through proxy servers and that senders should filter the resulting phantom opens with a "possible machine open" attribute. Email servers, it turns out, do interfere. We covered that mechanism in how Apple MPP manufactures fake email opens.

How Do You Spot an Ortto Message in Gmail?

Read the raw source. Our walkthrough on detecting tracking pixels in Gmail covers the same technique for other platforms.

• Open the message, click the three dot menu on the message itself rather than the toolbar, and choose Show original.
• Search for ortto, autopilot and user_email. A user_email= parameter followed by 64 hexadecimal characters is a strong Ortto signal.
• Compare the domain in every href against the domain the mail came from. A subdomain such as track.brand.com wrapping links to brand.com is the documented pattern.
• Search for width="1" or a 1 pixel image carrying a long unique identifier. That is the open pixel.

How Do You Block Ortto Tracking in Gmail?

An open exists only if your client fetches the image, and a click is recorded only if you travel through the redirect. Three approaches, with the tradeoffs stated honestly.

Turn off automatic image loading. In Gmail, open Settings, See all settings, and under Images choose "Ask before displaying external images". Nothing loads until you approve it, so the pixel never fires. Logos and receipts break too, which is why most people revert within a fortnight, and it does nothing about the click fallback.

Strip the parameters by hand. For an unwrapped link, copy the address and delete everything from the question mark onward, which removes the user_email hash and the UTM tags. A wrapped link is the tracker's URL end to end, so there is nothing to salvage.

Use a blocker extension. The only option that keeps ordinary images working while refusing the tracking request, because it filters by host rather than blocking everything, and the only one that covers the pixel and the wrapped link together.

Ortto Blockers Compared

No blocker catches everything, and the gaps between these tools are narrower than their marketing suggests. Where each lands against Ortto specifically:

• Gmail's image proxy. Not a blocker. It fetches images through Google's servers, hiding your IP address and device, but it still loads the pixel and still registers the open.
• Apple Mail Privacy Protection. Strips your IP and preloads images, which by Ortto's own admission floods the report with opens you never made. Corrupting the data is not withholding it, and clicks are untouched.
• Ugly Email. Flags tracked messages with an eye icon in the Gmail list before you open them. An early warning system rather than a stripper.
• PixelBlock. Blocks open pixels and reports the blocks, but leaves rewritten links alone. A real gap here, since a click can backfill the open.
• Trocker. Works across several webmail providers and shows where in the message the pixel sits.

Gblock sits in the extension category, and its differences are specific rather than sweeping. It runs inside Gmail, so you keep the account you already use. Its blocklist updates automatically, which matters against a vendor running seven hostnames off a single certificate, because a list frozen at install time decays quietly. And it strips tracking links as well as pixels, the half that Ortto's click fallback and its user_email hash both depend on.

What it cannot promise is total coverage, and that limit is structural. A sender who has configured track.theirbrand.com serves the identical pixel from a hostname no blocklist has seen, which is precisely what Ortto's custom domain feature is sold to produce. Our roundup of email tracker blocker extensions sets out where that ceiling sits. Host blocking is a very good filter, not a wall.

The Practical Bottom Line

Ortto documents its mechanics more openly than most competitors manage, but candour is not a control. Tracking is on by default, every switch belongs to the sender, and the one gesture that feels like refusal, clicking unsubscribe, travels through the same wrapped redirect as everything else.

In Europe the legal position is at least settled. The EDPB's Guidelines 2/2023 on the technical scope of Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive concluded that a tracking pixel instructs the recipient's device to send information to a remote server, placing it inside the consent requirement. That duty belongs to the sender, and nothing in your inbox says which senders took it seriously. Which leaves one place where the decision is yours: your own client, in the instant before the request leaves your machine.