Is Patreon Tracking Your Email? How to Block It

Patreon email tracking is how a creator knows what share of patrons opened last month's bonus episode email. Every time someone you support publishes a post, Patreon emails it to members, and free members too if the post is set to reach them. Those emails come from bingo@patreon.com, and Patreon's own help center confirms they carry a tracking pixel. The more useful question is who learns what. We read Patreon's creator documentation and its privacy policy, then checked its DNS, certificate logs and tracking servers directly on 18 September 2026. The honest answer is more nuanced than a flat yes.

Key Takeaways

• Patreon's Post Insights help article states that "Email opens are tracked using a pixel in the email," and that an open counts when the pixel loads.
• email.updates.patreon.com is a CNAME to mailgun.org, and on 18 September 2026 its /o/ path returned a 43 byte transparent GIF with a cache header that forbids storing it, the signature of a Mailgun open pixel.
• Patreon's creator documentation describes open and click rates per post, with no per member email engagement column in the Relationship Manager, unlike Substack, which shows writers individual subscriber activity.
• Patreon's privacy policy, last updated 27 May 2026, says that when you "view or interact with an email or notification from Patreon" it may receive your IP address, approximate location, device type and "the links you click."
• Certificate transparency logs show nine new Mailgun tracking hostnames on patreon.com subdomains issued on 3 and 10 August 2026, and the EasyPrivacy filter list's Patreon rule still targets an older host.

Does Patreon Track Whether You Open Post Emails?

Yes, and Patreon says so plainly. The FAQ at the bottom of its Post Insights help article reads: "Email opens are tracked using a pixel in the email. When the email is opened and the pixel loads, it counts as an open." It adds a caveat that some apps block tracking while others load the pixel without a real open, so creators should treat each rate "as a rough estimate."

Clicks are measured as well. The same glossary defines Email Click Rate as "The percentage of users who clicked on a Patreon link in the email." That wording matters. It counts clicks on links pointing back to Patreon, which is exactly the traffic Patreon wants: a patron leaving the inbox to like, comment and watch inside the app.

The design nudges in that direction too. According to Patreon's guide to text previews in member emails, text posts go out as "Show preview only" by default, so the email teases the post and you click through to read the rest. Each of those clicks is measured.

Which Servers Carry Patreon's Email Tracking?

Patreon's tracking runs on Mailgun, reached through hostnames that look like Patreon's own. Mailgun's tracking documentation tells senders to "point CNAME records to mailgun.org for Mailgun to rewrite links." Patreon's DNS follows that recipe:

• email.updates.patreon.com is a CNAME to mailgun.org. Certificate transparency logs show a certificate for this exact name renewed roughly every two months since 14 November 2023, which marks it as the long running tracking host.
• updates.patreon.com publishes v=spf1 include:mailgun.org ~all and uses Mailgun's mxa and mxb servers for mail exchange.
• Nine more sending subdomains follow the same pattern: community, core, creator, info, live, orders, privacy, safety and security. Each has its own tracking hostname, such as email.creator.patreon.com, pointing to mailgun.org, with certificates first issued on 3 August 2026 (10 August for privacy).

Then we tested the servers. A request to https://email.updates.patreon.com/o/test returned HTTP 200 with content-type: image/gif, content-length: 43 and cache-control: no-store. The body starts with GIF89a and describes a single transparent pixel. The no-store header tells every cache to fetch it fresh, so each open reaches the server. The /c/ path, Mailgun's click redirect, answered "Bad request" to our fake token, which shows a live click handler waiting for a signed link. The other nine hosts responded identically.

This has been going on for years. In a January 2019 post to his patrons, podcaster Kole of Duckfeed.tv warned that the private feed link in Patreon's welcome email actually pointed somewhere else, a URL that "begins with http://email.mailgun.patreon.com," and guessed Patreon did it for "marketing or metrics tracking." That older hostname now resolves to Patreon's main web servers instead of Mailgun.

For developers: patreon.com also publishes DKIM keys delegated to SendGrid and Mailchimp, and mail.patreon.com is a CNAME to sparkpostmail.com with SparkPost as its mail exchanger, which fits a bounce domain. We found no Patreon link or pixel host on those providers, but they are authorized to send.

What Does the Creator See About You?

Based on Patreon's documentation, the creator sees totals and rates, not a list of which patrons opened. The Post Insights dashboard reports, for up to 25 posts at a time:

• Seen: "the total number of emails opened" when the channel is email
• Email Open Rate: the share of delivered emails that were opened, which Patreon admits "May be inflated by auto-opening email clients"
• Email Click Rate: the share of users who clicked a Patreon link
• Conversions: new memberships, purchases and free members attributed to each post

The panel for a single post describes the same aggregates. On the people side, the Relationship Manager guide lists filters for email address, tier, join date, membership status and lifetime pledge amount. None of the documented filters or export columns covers email opens or clicks.

That is a real difference from Substack. As we found in our Substack email tracking investigation, Substack gives writers a per subscriber activity rating and open history. Patreon's creator never gets that view, according to its documentation. What the creator does get is your email address, by default. Patreon's email sharing article says "subscribing to a creator on Patreon automatically shares your email address with them," and the creator can export it. Once that address lands in the creator's own newsletter tool, that tool's tracking applies instead.

What Does Patreon Itself Learn?

Patreon learns considerably more than the creator does. The Patreon privacy policy, last updated 27 May 2026, says that when you "view or interact with an email or notification from Patreon, we may automatically receive information about you." The list that follows includes your IP address, "your approximate location (typically derived from your IP address)," your browser or device type, your operating system and "the links you click."

Mailgun's own event format shows how granular this can be. The sample opened event in Mailgun's webhook payload documentation carries a recipient address, an IP, a timestamp, a geolocation block with city, region and timezone, and a client-info block with client name, operating system, device type and user agent. Here is the difference in one sentence: the creator sees an open rate, while the infrastructure Patreon rents records which address opened, when, and from roughly where. We cannot see how long Patreon keeps those events, and its policy does not say.

Gmail softens part of this. Google's images help page says "Senders can't use image loading to get information about your computer or location," because Gmail fetches images through its own proxy. The same page concedes that "senders may know whether you've opened an email that has an image." So the open still registers, with your address attached.

Why Filter Lists Miss Most of Patreon's Hosts

Public blocklists are behind. The EasyPrivacy email tracker list has one Patreon rule, .mailgun.patreon.com/o/$image, which matches the retired 2019 hostname. AdGuard's mail tracking filter does list email.updates.patreon.com, but when we checked on 18 September 2026 neither list named any of the nine hosts that appeared in August.

That is the underappreciated part of this story. Patreon went from one tracking hostname to ten within eight days, and any blocker keyed on exact hostnames has to catch up one entry at a time. A rule matching the Mailgun path pattern on any patreon.com subdomain would cover all ten, but only if the list maintainer writes it that way. When comparing tools, ask how often the blocklist updates and whether it matches patterns or only fixed hosts.

How to Block Patreon Email Tracking in Gmail

You can cut most of it with free settings, then add a tool if you want it handled automatically. Our full guide on how to block email tracking in Gmail covers each option in more depth.

1. Turn off automatic images. Following Google's steps: Settings, See all settings, the Images section, "Ask before displaying external images," then Save Changes. Patreon's pixel will not load until you allow images for that message.
2. Read posts in the app instead. If you mostly read on Patreon anyway, open Settings, then Email notifications and switch off post emails for creators you follow closely. No email means no email pixel, though Patreon still logs what you view on its site.
3. Skip the redirect. Links in post emails point to an email.*.patreon.com host before reaching the post. Opening the creator's page directly avoids logging the click against that email.
4. Limit email sharing. In Settings, Privacy, Creator email sharing, you can stop your address going to new creators. This does not stop Patreon's pixels, but it keeps your address out of outside newsletter tools.

For how these extensions work under the hood, and how to tell a blocker from a sender side tracker, see our roundup of email tracker Chrome extensions.

What This Means for Your Inbox

Patreon is a gentler case than most creator platforms we have looked at. A creator cannot open a dashboard and see that you skipped their last three posts, so their pixel is not used to single you out for a guilt trip email. Patreon uses the numbers to coach creators toward subject lines and calls to action that pull people back into the app, as the "How to Improve Performance" section of its Post Insights article spells out. The contrast is sharp next door: Gumroad exposes per recipient open status to sellers, down to a Resend to non openers button.

Gentler is not private, though. Patreon keeps the per person trail, and the subjects of these emails can be personal: which podcasts, artists and adult creators you back is information many people would rather keep to themselves. Opening a post email can also confirm to Patreon that the address and device are active, even on a free membership you forgot about. If you want to check any message yourself, our guide on how to detect email tracking pixels in Gmail shows how to read the raw source and spot an email.updates.patreon.com image.

What We Could Not Verify

We did not dissect a live post email from bingo@patreon.com, so we cannot confirm which of the ten Mailgun hostnames post emails use today; email.updates.patreon.com is the strongest candidate given its certificate history and its listing in AdGuard's filter. Mailgun's documentation describes a transparent PNG, while Patreon's hosts served a GIF to our test request. Our finding that creators see only aggregates rests on Patreon's published documentation; a feature in testing could change that. We also found no statement on how long Patreon retains email engagement events.