Sortd Email Tracking: Is Sortd for Gmail Tracking You?

Yes. Sortd email tracking is real, it is switched on by default for senders whose plan includes it, and nothing in the message tells you. Sortd for Gmail is a Chrome extension that turns an inbox into Kanban boards. Since June 5, 2018 it has also sold what Sortd calls read receipts: a hidden image added to outgoing mail that reports back when you open it. We unpacked the extension's public package without installing it, found the exact markup and address it inserts, and requested that address ourselves. Back came a transparent 1x1 PNG, 129 bytes long.

Key Takeaways

• Sortd's own security page says that for email tracking it "specifically adds a tracking pixel to the bodies of emails," and its help center says Open Tracking "will be on by default."
• Version 2.4.982.982 of the Sortd extension, updated September 15, 2026, inserts a zero width image served from web.sortd.com/srv/rr/, and our test request on October 7, 2026 returned a 129 byte, 1x1 PNG.
• Sortd senders watch a gray icon turn blue in real time, then see how many times a message was read, "on what device, and in most cases the location of the recipient."
• Sortd's pricing page lists Email Tracking from the Essentials plan at $16 per user per month, and we found no link click tracking in its documentation or its extension code.
• Sortd's extension blocks this same pixel in the sender's browser, after asking for an extra Chrome permission, so that senders' own opens are not counted.

Does Sortd Track Email Opens?

Yes, and Sortd says so in three places. The Chrome Web Store listing for Sortd for Gmail advertises "Email open tracking to know when your emails are read." When we checked on October 7, 2026 it showed 40,000 users and a 4.1 rating from 476 ratings.

The feature arrived in a June 5, 2018 post by Wayne Silbermann titled Keeping track of who's read your emails with Sortd: "We've added GDPR compliant read receipts. See when people open and read your emails, in real time!" Sortd's help article How does email tracking work? sets out the default: "To track emails you just enable the Open Tracking feature (it will be on by default so you can turn it off for emails you don't want to track)."

So the sender has a switch for each email, and it starts in the on position. In the extension, the compose window gets a menu headed "Track this email" with two checkboxes, "Track opens" and "Notify me when opened."

Which plans? The 2018 post called tracking "a premium feature" on plans named Pro and Team. Neither is among the plans listed today. On the Sortd pricing page we loaded on October 7, 2026, Email Tracking first appears under Essentials, at "$16 / user / mo" billed annually. The $10 Starter list leaves it out, and the extension carries a message for accounts without it: "Email tracking is not available on your current plan." A footnote on the pricing page says "Sortd starts all users on a 14 Day trial in a Business Plan," the tier above Essentials, while a banner on the same page advertises a "7-day free trial."

How Does the Sortd Tracking Pixel Work?

Sortd's extension appends a hidden image to the message just before Gmail sends it, and the image lives on Sortd's servers. Sortd's security page, last revised February 9, 2023, puts it this way: "when enabled by the user, Sortd specifically adds a tracking pixel to the bodies of emails."

The public extension package shows the rest. We downloaded version 2.4.982.982 from the Chrome Web Store, unzipped it and searched the scripts. This is the markup it adds:

<div name="sortd_readrcpt" style="max-width:0;max-height:0;overflow:hidden"><img alt="" style="width:0;max-height:0;overflow:hidden;" src="https://web.sortd.com/srv/rr/{id}?from={sender}"></div>

• The {id} is one unique identifier per message. It is generated when the compose window opens, from a timestamp plus random values, so everyone in To and Cc gets the same address. The pixel can report that a message was opened. It cannot say which of five recipients opened it.
• The {sender} is a hashed ID for the Sortd user. It rides along in the query string.
• Sortd gets the context too. After Gmail sends, the extension hands Sortd's embedded app the thread ID, message ID, subject and the To and Cc recipients, tied to that identifier.

Then we asked the server. On October 7, 2026 a request to that path with a made up identifier returned HTTP 200, content type image/png, 129 bytes: a transparent PNG measuring 1 by 1. Two controls came back differently. A nonsense folder beside /rr/ answered with a redirect to the home page, and a nonsense path at the root returned 403. The same path on app.sortd.com served the identical image.

DNS was no help. A nonsense subdomain of sortd.com answered NOERROR with no address, exactly like real looking guesses such as track.sortd.com, so a missing record proves nothing in this zone.

What Does a Sortd Sender See?

A Sortd sender sees that you opened the message, how often, when, on what kind of device and sometimes where. Sortd's help article describes an icon in Sent Items: "If it's gray the mail has been tracked but hasn't been read. As soon as a mail has been read, the icon will change to blue. No need to refresh - it will update in real-time."

Clicking that icon opens what Sortd calls the Activity Stream, with "more details like how many times a particular message has been read, on what device, and in most cases the location of the recipient." The 2018 announcement said "in some cases." The templates inside the extension match: a panel headed "Email Opens," a line reading "Your message was opened" with a count, and entries built from the pattern "Opened in {location} on a {device} device," each with a date. Tracking "works on a per message basis," so a sender can see which replies in a thread you read.

Desktop alerts are optional. They need the "Notify me when opened" box and a Chrome notification permission.

How much of that survives Gmail? Google's help page on images in Gmail says "Senders can't use image loading to get information about your computer or location," then concedes "Sometimes, senders may know whether you've opened an email that has an image." Gmail fetches images through Google's proxy, so the open and its time still arrive at Sortd. The device and location belong to the proxy. We explain what leaks in the tracking pixel that learned to dodge Gmail.

Does Sortd Track Link Clicks?

Not that we could find. Sortd's help center and its 2018 announcement describe open tracking only, and the compose menu offers no click option. We searched the extension's scripts for link and click tracking terms and got nothing. The code that runs before sending appends the image and leaves your links alone.

That sets Sortd apart from the tools that rewrite every URL so a click passes through their servers first, a technique we cover in is Mailtrack safe. A link in a Sortd tracked email should point where it says it points.

Can You Tell If an Email Was Tracked by Sortd?

Not by looking at it. The image is zero pixels wide, the markup carries no visible text, and none of the three Sortd help articles we read mentions any notice to the recipient. Compare a standard read receipt request: RFC 8098 says "it is strongly recommended that the user agent obtain the user's consent before sending an MDN." A pixel asks nobody.

You can still check the source:

1. Open the message in Gmail on a computer.
2. Click the three dot menu and choose "Show original."
3. Search the page for sortd.com/srv/rr. If nothing turns up, try the shorter srv/rr, since raw email source can wrap long lines.

A match means the sender had Sortd tracking on for that message. We did not send ourselves a tracked email, so we can't promise the sortd_readrcpt name survives Gmail's handling. The address is the marker to trust. For other tools, see how to tell if your email is being tracked.

Why Does Sortd Block Its Own Pixel?

Because the pixel can't tell the sender from the reader. Sortd's help article on tracking all opens except your own, modified February 18, 2025, admits: "Sortd tracks ALL email opens, whether someone else opens your email or whether YOU open your own email."

Sortd's fix is an extra Chrome permission covering sortd.com and googleusercontent.com, the domain behind Gmail's image proxy. The prompt in the extension says it is needed to "Exclude your own opens from being tracked." Once granted, the background script registers a rule through Chrome's declarativeNetRequest API, which Google says "is used to block or modify network requests by specifying declarative rules." The rule's action is "block," its resource type is image, and its pattern matches web.sortd.com/srv/rr/ addresses ending in that user's own hashed ID.

Most coverage of sender tools stops at the pixel. The detail worth keeping is this one: Sortd ships a pixel blocker inside its own product, scoped to protect the sender's statistics. A recipient who blocks the same request is using Sortd's own remedy with a wider pattern.

Is Sortd Email Tracking GDPR Compliant?

Sortd says yes, while its help center tells EU users to think about switching tracking off. The article Email tracking in relation to EU citizens and GDPR, modified October 4, 2022, describes a setting that is on by default: "Sortd will not record email reads where it can detect that the recipient is located in the EU." It then recommends that EU senders "switch the default Email tracking setting to Disabled all together OR be very careful to choose which emails and recipients you apply tracking to."

Two things stand out. The safeguard keys on where the reader is, not on whether the reader agreed. And it works after the fact: the extension code that inserts the pixel checks only whether tracking is enabled, never who the recipients are, so the image still goes out and is still requested. Sortd decides on its side whether to keep the record. Sortd does not document how it detects location. If it relies on the address making the request, a Gmail reader in Paris arrives as Google's proxy.

Regulators have moved since 2018. France's CNIL published its final recommendation on tracking pixels in emails on April 14, 2026, setting out when a pixel needs consent and when it is exempt. Our earlier piece on the CNIL and tracking pixel consent has the background.

Is Sortd Safe? What It Can Access in Gmail

Sortd is an established extension with very broad Gmail access, and a privacy policy that never mentions the people who receive tracked mail. What we verified on October 7, 2026:

• Google account access. Sortd's security page says Google may display its request as "Read, compose, send, and permanently delete all your email from Gmail" plus offline access. Google's Gmail API scope list gives that description to the restricted https://mail.google.com/ scope.
• What Sortd says it keeps. "Sortd does NOT read the content of your email," the page states, and stores "only certain email metadata such as the MessageId, Sender, Subject and Date." It adds that Sortd "undergoes an annual independent security audit."
• Chrome permissions. The Manifest V3 file requests storage, scripting and declarativeNetRequestWithHostAccess on mail.google.com and app.sortd.com. Notifications, all of sortd.com and googleusercontent.com are optional.
• Store disclosure. The listing says the extension handles personally identifiable information, personal communications, location and user activity.
• Who runs it. The developer is Sortd Inc, with an address in Beaverton, Oregon and a phone number carrying South Africa's +27 code. ITWeb reported on July 30, 2019 that the US based firm was built by South African founders, with most development done in South Africa.

The Sortd privacy policy, last revised October 25, 2024, is written for account holders. The word "recipient" does not appear in it. On retention it gives no number: "Sortd may retain your data including any personal information for a period of time that is consistent with our business purposes." Its sub processor table names Amazon Web Services, MongoDB, Stripe, MixPanel, Mailchimp, BigMailer, FreshWorks, CloudAMQP and Google, and the security page says everything runs "hosted in the USA on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure." How long an open record about you is kept, we could not find.

Sortd vs Streak, Mailtrack, Boomerang and Right Inbox

Sortd is the only one of these five where we found open tracking without click tracking. The Sortd row is this investigation; the others come from our pieces on Streak CRM tracking, Mailtrack, Boomerang read receipts and Right Inbox tracking.

Sortd is also the smallest by reach. Its listing shows 40,000 users against the more than 250,000 we recorded for Right Inbox, and its tracking sits behind a paid tier where Streak's is free.

What This Means for Your Gmail Inbox

Sortd tracked mail does not look like marketing. It comes from a real person's Gmail account: the account manager chasing an invoice, the support agent answering your ticket, the recruiter moving your card across a hiring board. There is no newsletter footer and no unsubscribe link to tip you off, which is why this kind of tracking goes unnoticed longer than bulk email pixels do. Our roundup of email tracker Chrome extensions covers the wider field.

The default matters more than the feature. A sender who never touches the menu tracks every message. And because Sortd is a team tool, your open does not stay in one person's Sent folder. It lands next to a card on a board that colleagues can see.

Gmail's proxy takes the edge off by hiding your address and device. It still fetches the image, so the fact and time of your open get through.

How Do You Block Sortd Email Tracking?

Stop the image request and the sender's icon stays gray. You have three realistic routes in Gmail, and our guide on how to block email tracking in Gmail goes deeper on each.

1. Turn off automatic images. In Gmail on a computer, open Settings, See all settings, scroll to Images, pick "Ask before displaying external images" and click Save Changes. No fetch, no receipt. The cost: every image in every email waits for a click on "Display images below," and that click loads the pixel with the rest.
2. Use a blocker extension. On October 7, 2026 the Chrome Web Store showed PixelBlock at 40,000 users, last updated December 2, 2025, describing itself as "a Gmail extension that blocks people from tracking when you open their emails." Trocker showed 10,000 users and version 3.4.1 from July 10, 2026, and says it "blocks attempts by email trackers." We did not test either against Sortd's pixel.
3. Use Gblock, with one extra step. Gblock works inside Gmail on desktop Chrome. Its blocklist updates itself from Gblock's servers without waiting for an extension release, it flags unknown images of 150 bytes or less (Sortd's is 129), and it strips tracking parameters such as utm_source from links. Sortd was not in the list bundled with the extension when we checked on October 7, 2026, and we have not run Gblock against a live Sortd message. So we won't claim it stops Sortd out of the box. What you can do is add a custom filter with the action set to block and the text sortd.com/srv/rr/.

If the sender is a colleague or a supplier you trust, there is a fourth option: ask them to untick "Track opens." It is one checkbox on their side. For a side by side look at blockers, see email trackers for Gmail and how to block them.

What We Could Not Verify

We did not install Sortd or send a tracked email, so everything about the pixel comes from the extension package on the Chrome Web Store and one test request. We never saw the image inside a received message. The on by default claim rests on Sortd's own help pages, the main one last modified on June 5, 2018; in the extension, the compose switch takes its starting state from an account setting held by Sortd, so the code alone does not confirm the default. That leaves open how Sortd derives device and location, how its EU detection works, how long open records are kept, and whether its mobile app or Gmail add on can track at all. Sortd's pricing page also served more than one version of its plan lists in the HTML we fetched; Email Tracking sat under Essentials in each.