Shortwave Read Receipts: Does Shortwave Track Your Email?

Shortwave is an AI email client built on top of Gmail by a team of former Googlers. If someone wrote to you from it, can they see that you opened the message? Possibly. Shortwave read receipts exist under the name Read Statuses, alongside a link tracking feature, and both appear on every paid plan. They are off until the sender switches them on, which means most Shortwave email carries no tracking at all. The ones that do will report back when you open them, unless something in your inbox stops the request.

Key Takeaways

• Shortwave launched Read Statuses in a March 27, 2024 blog post, and the feature shows senders whether an email was opened, who opened it and approximately when.
• Shortwave says Read Statuses are "off by default," and a sender turns them on under Settings, Compose, Read statuses.
• Shortwave's pricing page lists Read Statuses and Link tracking on all three paid plans, Business ($30 per seat per month), Premier ($45) and Max ($120).
• Shortwave also advertises "Block spy trackers," the automatic removal of tracking pixels in its own users' inboxes, plus an image proxy.
• Gmail proxies images but does not block known trackers, so a Gmail user who receives a tracked Shortwave email still registers an open by default.

Does Shortwave Track Your Email?

Yes, but only when the sender opts in. Shortwave's Read Statuses announcement, written by Sophia Seltenreich and published March 27, 2024, describes a feature that tells you "if your email has been opened" and "who opened your email." The same post is clear that "read statuses are off by default."

Shortwave's features page pitches it plainly: "See when people read your emails." Right beneath it sits a second feature: "See when links in the emails you send are clicked." So there are two separate signals a sender can collect:

• Read Statuses report opens, per recipient, with an approximate time.
• Link tracking reports clicks. Shortwave's 2024 feature roundup says it "shows who clicked on a specific link along with the relevant email thread."

That puts Shortwave in the same camp as Superhuman, which offers read tracking behind a toggle, and in the opposite camp from Missive, which removed read receipts entirely in 2020.

What Can a Shortwave Sender See About You?

A Shortwave sender with Read Statuses on can see that you opened their email and roughly when. According to the launch post, a small envelope icon appears on each sent message, and Shortwave shows the "approximate time an email was opened by each recipient." It adds: "we do not show recipients' device or location information."

That restraint is worth crediting. Many tracking extensions surface a city and a device type. Still, open times alone reveal a lot. Over a few weeks of email, a sender can learn when you wake up, when you check mail at night, and whether you read their proposal three times before replying.

Opens also do not stay in one place. Shortwave says "recent opens are shown in a live activity feed of email engagement," so your reading activity scrolls past in a dashboard next to every other recipient's. Link clicks appear with the thread they came from, which ties a specific click to a specific conversation.

Who Can Turn On Shortwave Read Receipts?

Any paying Shortwave user can turn them on. The Shortwave pricing page lists Read statuses and Link tracking under "Productivity" on Business at $30 per seat per month, Premier at $45 and Max at $120. The launch post described Read Statuses as a Business plan feature, and the current pricing carries it through every tier above that.

The switch lives at Settings, Compose, Read statuses. Once it is on, the launch post says the sender will "start receiving insights into all future email interactions." In other words, it is a blanket setting for outgoing mail, not something picked message by message, and it works from Shortwave's desktop, iOS and Android apps.

Here is the practical math. A $30 seat buys a salesperson open tracking for every email they send, forever. You, the recipient, get no notice and no setting to decline, because nothing about a tracked email looks different from an untracked one.

How Does Shortwave Detect an Open?

Shortwave does not publish how Read Statuses detect an open, so we can only describe the constraint every tool faces. Email has no reliable way to report a read except the old disposition notification standard, which the recipient's client may ignore or ask permission for. Almost every open tracker instead embeds a unique remote image and records when it is fetched. Our explainer on how Gmail read receipts work walks through both methods.

We looked for the host that would serve such an image. On September 29, 2026 we queried a set of likely hostnames on shortwave.com, with a nonsense subdomain as a control so a wildcard record could not fake a hit:

A one letter "t" subdomain is a common naming choice for tracking endpoints, but a name is not proof. We did not capture a tracked Shortwave email, so we are not claiming t.shortwave.com serves Read Statuses pixels.

Does Shortwave Block Trackers for Its Own Users?

Yes. Shortwave's features page says "our image proxy & tracking pixel blocking keep your privacy intact," and the pricing page lists "Block spy trackers," described as "the automatic removal of invasive tracking pixels in your inbox," on all paid plans.

So Shortwave protects its customers from other people's pixels while offering those same customers a way to track their recipients. That is not hypocrisy so much as a business decision: the person paying gets both privacy and insight. The person on the other end gets neither, unless their own inbox does the blocking.

An awkward consequence follows. If a Shortwave user sends a tracked email to another Shortwave user, the recipient's tracker blocking may well defeat the sender's Read Statuses. We did not test that pairing, but it would explain why Shortwave describes opens as approximate.

What Does Shortwave's AI Do With Your Email?

Shortwave's AI reads the email in the account of the Shortwave user, which includes anything you send them. Its AI Assistant guide says the assistant searches email history in plain language, analyzes threads and drafts replies.

The Shortwave security page says "besides Google Cloud, we only use OpenAI, Anthropic, and Pinecone" as sub processors, that data is "encrypted at rest using AES256," and that "your data will never be used to train third party LLMs." This is not tracking in the pixel sense: nothing reports back to the sender about your behavior. It does mean your words pass through third party AI providers once they reach a Shortwave inbox.

What This Means for Your Gmail Inbox

Gmail will not stop a Shortwave read receipt on its own. Google's help page on images explains that Gmail loads external images through its own servers, which hides your IP address and location. A proxy hides who opened the email, not whether it was opened. The image still gets requested, and the sender's dashboard still lights up.

Link tracking slips past the proxy entirely, because the click itself is the signal. Shortwave users get a blocking layer on top of their proxy. Gmail users do not, unless they add one.

How Do You Block Shortwave Read Receipts in Gmail?

You block them by stopping the tracking request before it fires. Our guide on how to block email tracking in Gmail compares every option. The short version:

1. Turn off automatic images. In Gmail on the web, open Settings, See all settings, find Images, choose "Ask before displaying external images" and save, per Google's instructions. It works, at the cost of clicking to see every legitimate image.
2. Hover before you click. A link whose visible text differs from its real destination is likely a click tracking redirect.
3. Add a blocker that runs inside Gmail. Gblock blocks requests to known tracking hosts from an automatically updated list, flags unknown pixel sized images, and strips tracking parameters from links. It cannot stop a tracker nobody has identified yet.
4. Inspect suspicious messages. Gmail's "Show original" reveals tiny images and long, unique image URLs.

What We Could Not Verify

We did not send a tracked email from a paid Shortwave account, so we cannot confirm the image host, the URL format or whether Read Statuses use a pixel at all, since Shortwave's launch post does not say. We also could not confirm how link tracking rewrites URLs, or how Shortwave handles opens triggered by image proxies such as Gmail's. The findings above rest on Shortwave's own public pages and our September 29, 2026 DNS checks.