Spike Email Read Receipts: Does Spike Track Your Email?

Spike email read receipts are on in every Spike plan, and you do not need to use Spike to trigger one. Spike, the conversational email app made by SpikeNow Ltd. in Israel, marks a sent message with a green eye once the recipient has seen it. Its features page says Spike users can "see read indicator (even if the recipient isn’t a Spike user)." So the answer to the title is yes for anyone who receives mail from a Spike user. On October 9, 2026 we read Spike's help center, pricing page, privacy policy and App Store listing, plus the JavaScript of its web app, to work out what the eye measures and what a Gmail user can do about it.

Key Takeaways

• Spike's features page says senders "see read indicator (even if the recipient isn’t a Spike user)," and its pricing page lists "Message read indicator" under "All plans include," which covers the free Email App plan.
• Spike's help center defines the green eye as "Your message was seen by the recipient," and a tap on a profile picture shows "when the message was sent and when it was seen."
• Gadget Hacks reported on August 10, 2022 that Spike puts "an invisible tracking pixel in each sent email" and that "Read receipts are on by default," and we found no Spike help page describing a way to turn the eye off.
• Spike's comparison page against Gmail ticks both "Privacy-first: no ads, no tracking" and "Read indicators & live presence," while its App Store privacy label says "Usage Data" may be used to track Spike users across other companies' apps and websites.
• Gmail shows images automatically by default, and Google says senders "may know whether you've opened an email that has an image," so Gmail's image setting decides whether a Spike sender's eye turns green.

Does Spike Have Email Read Receipts?

Yes. Spike calls them read indicators, and they come with every plan. Spike's getting started guide pitches it plainly: "Want to know if someone read your message? We’ve got read indicators." The same page explains the icons a sender sees beside each message:

• Green tick: "Your message was sent."
• Green eye: "Your message was seen by the recipient. Within Groups, the green eye means it was read by at least 1 member of the Group."
• Grey upward arrow: "The message is being sent."
• Red exclamation mark: "Your message was not sent."

The eye also carries a time. Spike's Spike 101 help page tells senders to tap the profile picture next to a sent message, and "A small window will appear that shows when the message was sent and when it was seen." The features page sells the timestamp as a follow up tool: "See what time your message was read, taking the guesswork out of figuring out when to follow-up."

None of this is new. The app first shipped as Hop, and Spike's own site still links to an App Store address that reads "hop-email-at-the-speed-of-life." When Spike raised $5 million in 2019, a UC Today report from June 18 of that year already said users could "know if someone fails to respond via message read receipts."

Plan level makes no difference. On the pricing page we read, the Email App plans were Free at $0, Pro at $6 and Ultimate at $12 per user per month billed annually, and the Teamspace plans ran from a free Starter tier to Business at $8 per member. Both tabs list "Message read indicator" under "All plans include."

How Does Spike Know You Opened the Email?

Spike has two cases, and which one applies depends on whether you use Spike yourself. Between two Spike users, Spike runs the app on both ends of the conversation, and it shares more than the eye. Spike users "can see each other’s indication of ‘Online’ or ‘Last Seen’," but Spike 101 adds that this "will not show if the other party is not a Spike user or if this is the first message between you and the other person."

The read indicator has no such limit, which is the part that matters if you use Gmail. Spike's help center does not explain how the eye works for outside recipients. The most specific description we found is a Gadget Hacks guide to email read tracking by Daniel Hipskind, published August 10, 2022. It says Spike's tracking "includes an invisible tracking pixel in each sent email that's treated as an image." A pixel of this kind is a tiny remote image. Your mail app fetches it from the sender's server when you open the message, and that fetch is the signal.

What the web app code shows

Spike's web app at spikenow.com/web loads its interface as plain JavaScript files, so anyone can read how the eye is drawn. In ui/messages.js, a function named _statusIndicator switches a sent message's icon to 'seen' when a value called trackerts is present. That value comes from item.metadata.tracker[0].ts, a timestamp stored under a field Spike's own developers named tracker.

The browser code displays that timestamp. We found nothing in the web app's sending and message building files that adds an image to outgoing mail, so we could not see the pixel or its address from the browser side.

Why we can't name the tracking hostname

Spike does not publish where its pixel loads from, and DNS gave us nothing useful. We looked up a nonsense name, zq7xk3-nonsense-gblock.spikenow.com, as a control. It resolved to the same two addresses as spikenow.com itself, which means the domain answers every subdomain with a wildcard record. Any guess at a pixel hostname would resolve too, so a lookup proves nothing. We are not naming one.

Spike's privacy policy, last modified January 2025, does not fill the gap. It never uses the words "recipient," "pixel" or "read receipt," so it does not say what Spike records when a non user opens a tracked message.

Can Spike Users Turn Read Receipts Off?

We found no documented way to do it. Gadget Hacks wrote that "Read receipts are on by default, so you have nothing to enable," and that Spike "shows a small eyeball icon next to opened emails in the chat view and in your mailboxes" rather than sending alerts. We searched all 55 English pages in Spike's help center and found no setting that disables the read indicator, per message or for the whole account. The English interface text in Spike's web app has labels for "Last seen" and "Mark Read on Archive," but none for switching the eye off.

That puts Spike at the far end of its category. Our Superhuman read status review found that Superhuman made tracking opt in after a 2019 backlash. Spike documents neither an opt in nor an opt out.

How to spot mail sent from Spike

Free Spike accounts announce themselves. Spike's signature help page says "There is Spike branding in the signatures of all free accounts," and only paying users can remove it. In 2022, Gadget Hacks described that signature as the sender's profile picture, name and "Chat @ Spike." A Spike line at the bottom of an email tells you a read indicator came with it. A missing line proves nothing, because paid users can delete it.

Does Spike Block Trackers in Mail You Receive?

Not as far as Spike documents it. Its help center has no page about tracking pixels, remote images or an image proxy for incoming mail. In the web app code, the only image hiding we found is a "Click to show images" bar tied to one message state. The app's English text file has a similar line, "Tap to display images," stored under the name spamShowImages. We found nothing that holds back images in ordinary mail.

The contrast with rivals is sharp. Our Canary Mail review found that Canary adds read receipts to outgoing mail but blocks incoming tracking pixels by default. Our Shortwave review found that Shortwave advertises "Block spy trackers" for its own users. Spike sends a read indicator on every plan and documents no shield for the person reading.

What Spike's marketing says about tracking

Spike's Spike vs Gmail page has a feature table that ticks "Privacy-first: no ads, no tracking" for Spike, and two rows further down it ticks "Read indicators & live presence." The prose below says: "No tracking, no ads, and no hidden data mining." Its Mailspring comparison goes further and criticizes open tracking outright: "Instead of tracking whether prospects opened emails, we focus on ensuring your team stays aligned on what to do next."

Read in context, "no tracking" sits next to "no ads" and means Spike does not profile its own users for advertising. Spike's App Store listing is less tidy even on that point. Under "Data Used to Track You," SpikeNow Ltd. declares that "Usage Data" may be used "to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies." Apple notes the label "has not been verified by Apple." The person on the receiving end of a read indicator never agreed to either policy, and no "no tracking" claim covers them.

What Does Spike's iGPT Do With Email?

iGPT is a separate SpikeNow product that turns a company's mailboxes into a searchable index for AI agents. Spike's help center, blog and privacy policy pages now carry a banner reading "Get iGPT email intelligence API." CEO Dvir Ben Aroya introduced it in a February 4, 2026 blog post: "iGPT is what happens when you take everything we learned building Spike and turn it into something you can talk to."

The iGPT homepage describes what it touches. "iGPT deeply indexes emails and attachment data automatically," it "Indexes new messages and attachments instantly," and it "Automatically rebuilds email threads across time, participants, and attachments." The iGPT privacy policy, last modified December 2025, lists the data it processes for customers:

• User Content: "Email content, files, internal documents (e.g., user communications, reports, attachments), conversation history, and all contextual data."
• Derived Data: "embeddings, structured outputs, and extracted metadata."
• Technical Data: a list that includes "Inference inputs and outputs."

Two lines are worth holding side by side. The homepage promises "Zero Data Retention" because "Inputs, prompts, and outputs are never stored," while the policy lists inference inputs and outputs among the data it collects. The policy also says it "does not govern consumer Spike app," and that iGPT does "not use User Content nor Derived Data to train or fine-tune AI models."

For you as a correspondent, the point is simpler. An inbox holds other people's mail. If a company you write to connects its mailboxes to iGPT, your messages and attachments become part of the index it builds, under a contract you are not party to.

What This Means for Your Gmail Inbox

Spike's eye works on Gmail users because of a Gmail default, not a Spike trick. Google's image help page says: "By default, when you get an email with an image, you’ll see the image automatically." Google scans those images before you see them and says that, as a result, "Senders can’t use image loading to get information about your computer or location." The same page concedes the part Spike needs: "Sometimes, senders may know whether you've opened an email that has an image."

So a Spike user writing to your Gmail address can learn that you opened the message, and Spike shows them when. What Spike collects beyond that time is undocumented, and Google's promise about your computer and location is the only limit on it we could find in writing. For the general picture, see our guide to whether someone can tell you read their email.

How to Block Spike Read Receipts in Gmail

You cannot turn off a sender's Spike settings, but you can stop your inbox from fetching the image. These steps use Google's own labels for Gmail on a computer.

1. In Gmail, click Settings in the top right, then See all settings.
2. Scroll to the "Images" section and choose "Ask before displaying external images."
3. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.
4. When a message arrives with Spike branding in the signature, read it without clicking "Display images" unless you are happy for the sender to see the open.
5. Remember the setting is all or nothing. Logos, charts and photos in legitimate mail will also wait for your click.

Where Gblock fits

Gblock is a paid Chrome extension for Gmail on desktop. It blocks tracking pixels that match its list of known tracker addresses while the rest of a message's images keep loading, and it strips tracking from links. To be straight about Spike: because Spike does not publish where its pixel loads from, we cannot promise Gblock stops it today. Gmail's "Ask before displaying external images" setting stops it regardless of the address. Our guide to blocking email tracking in Gmail compares the options side by side.

How Spike Compares With Other Email Apps That Track Opens

Here is how Spike stacks up against five apps we reviewed earlier in this series, on the three questions that matter to a recipient.

• Spike: read indicator on all plans, including free. No documented off switch, no documented blocking of incoming trackers, and no pixel host we could identify.
• Superhuman: read status uses a tracking pixel, and Superhuman made it opt in after a 2019 backlash.
• Shortwave: Read Statuses are "off by default" and limited to paid plans, and Shortwave advertises "Block spy trackers" for its own users.
• Spark: our Spark Mail review found Read Statuses only on the Pro and Enterprise plans, behind a setting the sender switches on.
• Canary Mail: read receipts enabled by default on macOS, per Canary's help center, with incoming pixels blocked by default.
• Mailspring: our Mailspring review found tracking switched on unless the sender turns it off, and identified the pixel host.

Each of the other five offers a recipient at least one of three things: a way for the sender to switch tracking off, blocking of incoming trackers, or a pixel address that blockers can target. Spike is the only one where we could confirm none of the three.

The Quick Answer

Does Spike have email read receipts? Yes, as a green eye with a timestamp, on every plan. Does Spike track people who don't use it? Spike's own features page says the indicator works "even if the recipient isn’t a Spike user," and the one detailed outside account describes an invisible pixel. Can you stop it? Not from Spike's side. From Gmail, set external images to ask first, and treat a Spike signature as a sign that the message reports back.