Is SendPulse Tracking Your Email? How to Block It

An email from a course platform, an online store, or a chatbot subscription lands in your Gmail inbox, you open it, and somewhere inside a dashboard you will never see, a status quietly flips from sent to opened. SendPulse email tracking runs on that flip, and it is built into the campaign editor for every sender, whether that sender is a two person storefront or a company managing a list of a hundred thousand people. SendPulse is a multichannel marketing platform out of Ukraine that now counts more than 3 million registered users, a base larger than the population of Chicago, sending in excess of 1.2 billion emails a month alongside its chatbot, SMS, and CRM tools. Source: SendPulse's own growth story blog post. Here is exactly what its pixel and rewritten links capture when you open one of its emails, and how to shut both off inside Gmail.

Key Takeaways

• SendPulse embeds an open tracking pixel as a unique image request under the pulse-stat.com domain, documented in SendPulse's own SMTP tracking guide as a tag like s7085115.smtp02.pulse-stat.com/img/ followed by a token unique to that message.
• Every link in a tracked campaign gets rewritten to redirect through SendPulse's own infrastructure first, with the default domain documented as a per account subdomain of stat-pulse.com, before forwarding you to the page you actually meant to visit.
• Senders can swap that shared domain for a branded subdomain, and a public vulnerability disclosure on GitHub documents that abandoned SendPulse tracking subdomains pointing to track.stat-pulse.com can be claimed by a stranger inside their own SendPulse account.
• SendPulse's analytics dashboard breaks every open down by device, browser, country, and city through its Devices and Opens by location tabs, and its Clicks map tab shows exactly which link inside the email you clicked and how many times.
• Gblock blocks the SendPulse pixel domain before it loads and strips known tracking parameters from rewritten links, working inside Gmail the same way it already blocks tracking from Customer.io, Iterable, and the other platforms in this series.

Does SendPulse Track Email Opens?

Yes, for any campaign where the sender leaves tracking turned on in the campaign editor, which for most senders means every message they send. Per SendPulse's own guide to tracking campaign statistics, during the third step of building a campaign a sender reaches a Collect statistics section with Opens and Clicks checkboxes, presented as a standard part of setting up the send rather than a feature they have to dig for. The mechanism behind the Opens checkbox is the same one used across the industry: a tiny image request your Gmail client fires automatically the moment it renders the message, with no button to press and no prompt asking first.

SendPulse's own documentation for its SMTP sending module shows exactly what that request looks like. Per the SMTP tracking statistics guide, the pixel appears in an email's source code as an image tag pointing to a subdomain of pulse-stat.com, something like s7085115.smtp02.pulse-stat.com/img/ followed by a token unique to that send. That token is what lets SendPulse tie your open back to your specific email address the instant your inbox loads the image, even though the pixel itself is invisible and roughly the size of a single dot.

How Does SendPulse's Click Tracking Work?

SendPulse rewrites every clickable link in a tracked campaign so it routes through the company's own domain before it ever reaches the page you meant to visit. Per SendPulse's documentation on tracking domains, "by default, users are redirected to our sender service domain with the SendPulse domain certificate," documented as a per account subdomain of stat-pulse.com such as s6619822.stat-pulse.com. Click the link, and that server logs the click against your recipient record, updates the campaign's click count, and only then bounces your browser to the real destination.

Senders are not stuck with that shared domain. The same documentation walks through connecting a CNAME record so tracked links appear under a company's own domain instead, something like track.example.com, which makes the tracking harder for a recipient to spot on sight. That flexibility has a documented downside worth knowing about: a public vulnerability report filed on EdOverflow's can-i-take-over-xyz project describes SendPulse tracking subdomains that still point to track.stat-pulse.com after a company stops using them, which lets anyone claim that abandoned subdomain inside their own SendPulse account and route new campaign links through what still looks, to a recipient, like the original company's trusted domain. It is a reminder that link rewriting is not just a privacy question, it is infrastructure a company has to keep maintaining.

What Does SendPulse Show Senders About You?

SendPulse's campaign analytics dashboard is built to answer far more than whether you opened an email. Per SendPulse's tracking statistics documentation, a Devices tab shows senders "which devices and browsers recipients used to open your email," while an Opens by location tab surfaces "the countries and cities where users opened your campaign." A separate Clicks map tab shows which specific link inside the email got clicked and how many times, whether it was a line of body text or a social media icon in the footer.

Senders can also flip on a bot detection setting that flags opens and clicks that look automated, a tacit acknowledgment that not every pixel fire is a human being reading the email. The same documentation notes tracking links stay active for one year after a campaign sends, after which they stop resolving. None of that changes what happens the moment you open the message: your device, your rough location, and your click behavior get logged to a dashboard before you have decided whether the email was worth reading.

Why Email Users Should Care

SendPulse is not malware, and antivirus software has nothing to say about it, because it is not built to catch marketing infrastructure doing exactly what it was paid to do. Spam filters look for phishing kits and malicious attachments. They do not flag a pixel that logs your open timestamp so a sales team knows to follow up, or a rewritten link that confirms you clicked through to a course landing page.

That gap is precisely why a dedicated tracker blocker earns its place in Gmail rather than duplicating a security suite you already run. SendPulse sits behind onboarding sequences for online courses, ecommerce receipts, newsletter platforms, and small business tools you signed up for once and forgot about, so its tracking shows up across an inbox in ways a general privacy tool never surfaces on its own. Our guide to blocking email tracking in Gmail compares the options across the category if this is the first platform in the series you have read.

How Do You Block SendPulse Email Tracking in Gmail?

A few approaches work, each with real tradeoffs.

Disable automatic image loading. In Gmail, open Settings, then General, then Images, and choose "Ask before displaying external images." Nothing loads until you approve it, which stops most pixels cold, but it also hides every legitimate photo in every email you get until you click through, which gets old fast on a busy inbox.

Hover before you click. Hovering over a link before clicking reveals the stat-pulse.com rewrite, or a company's custom tracking subdomain, in your browser's status bar, confirming the click will be logged. It does nothing about the open pixel firing in the background the moment you opened the message.

Try a general purpose extension. Ugly Email and PixelBlock were among the first browser extensions built to flag tracked messages inside Gmail, and both still work today. They rely on static, manually maintained domain lists, a real limitation against a platform like SendPulse that lets any company route tracking through its own branded subdomain instead of the shared pulse-stat.com or stat-pulse.com default.

Switch to a privacy focused inbox. Proton Mail and HEY both default to blocking remote images more aggressively than Gmail. That is a real option, but it means migrating your entire inbox rather than adding a layer on top of the Gmail account you already use every day.

Use a dedicated blocker built for Gmail. Gblock runs inside Gmail and intercepts tracking pixel requests before they load, including the SendPulse infrastructure covered here, without hiding legitimate images or forcing you to switch providers. Its blocklist updates automatically instead of shipping as a fixed list a developer refreshes by hand, which matters against a platform that lets individual senders spin up their own custom tracking domains. Gblock also strips known tracking parameters from links, addressing the click identification problem that pixel blocking alone leaves open. It is not a defense against phishing or malware, only against the tracking mechanisms themselves, so treat it as one layer alongside normal email hygiene, not a full security suite. Our guide to detecting tracking pixels in Gmail walks through spotting one manually if you want to see the raw source code first.

The Bottom Line

SendPulse follows the same pixel and rewritten link pattern documented across this series, from Customer.io to Iterable, with one wrinkle that sets it apart: its custom tracking domain feature, meant to make campaigns look more polished, has a documented history of abandoned subdomains that outside parties can claim. Whether a sender uses the shared pulse-stat.com pixel and stat-pulse.com redirect or a branded domain built on the same CNAME pattern, the underlying mechanism reading your opens and clicks does not change. Block the pixel and strip the tracked link, and it stops mattering which domain was waiting to log it.