Is Superhuman Tracking Your Email? How to Block It

If a recruiter, investor, or sales rep emailed you and followed up at a suspiciously perfect moment, there is a good chance they were watching a read notification appear on their screen. Superhuman and Mixmax both built that capability directly into the product. The signal they use is the same one every other email tracker uses: an invisible image that loads when you open the message and quietly reports back. You cannot see it, but you can stop it.

Key Takeaways

• Superhuman offers a "read status" feature that shows the sender when, how many times, and on what device you opened their email, using a tracking pixel embedded in the message.
• Mixmax goes further, offering real time open notifications, per link click tracking, document view tracking, and a location estimate based on the IP address that loads the pixel.
• Superhuman made tracking opt in and removed precise location data after a 2019 backlash, but the open tracking itself still exists and is on for many senders by default within a sequence.
• Gmail's image proxy hides your true IP from the sender but still loads the pixel, so the open is still reported unless you actively block the tracker.
• A tracking pixel blocker such as Gblock stops Superhuman, Mixmax, and every other email tracker from registering that you opened the message.

Does Superhuman Track When You Open an Email?

Yes. Superhuman includes a feature it calls read statuses. When a Superhuman user sends you a message with the feature enabled, the outgoing email carries a tiny remote image. The instant your email client loads that image, Superhuman's server records the event and shows the sender a read indicator next to the message — along with the time you opened it, the number of times you reopened it, and the device type.

Superhuman has a complicated history with this feature. In 2019 the company was criticized after security researchers pointed out that read statuses were on by default, that recipients had no way to know they were being tracked, and that early versions surfaced the recipient's location based on the IP that loaded the pixel. Superhuman responded by making tracking opt in, removing location data from the notification, and adding controls for users who did not want to track. The underlying open tracking, however, never went away — it simply became something the sender chooses to switch on rather than something that ran silently for everyone.

What Does Mixmax Track?

Mixmax is a sales engagement platform that lives inside Gmail, and tracking is one of its headline features rather than an afterthought. Mixmax advertises real time email open notifications, link click tracking on every URL in the message, document and presentation view tracking, and a map view that places the open at an approximate location. For a salesperson running a sequence, Mixmax turns your inbox into a live dashboard of who looked at what and when.

The mechanism is the familiar one. Mixmax rewrites the outgoing email to include an invisible tracking pixel for opens, and it rewrites every link so clicks route through Mixmax before reaching the real destination. That is how a sender can see not just that you opened the email, but that you clicked the pricing page link at 9:14 in the morning and came back to the email twice that afternoon. Mixmax has a large install base on the Chrome Web Store, which means a meaningful slice of the sales and recruiting emails landing in your inbox carry its pixel.

Why Does the Sender Care So Much About Your Opens?

Open and click data is a buying signal. In sales, an opened email tells the rep you are engaged and helps them time the follow up call for maximum effect. In recruiting, hiring managers read open patterns as a proxy for candidate interest. In fundraising, a founder watching an investor reopen the deck three times knows exactly when to nudge. The data is harmless in friendly contexts and consequential in negotiations, where the other side learning your attention patterns shifts the balance of information toward them.

The catch is that the open metric only works against recipients who let the pixel load. The more people block trackers, the less reliable the signal becomes — which is why reported open rates across every sales tool have been quietly deflating for years.

Does Gmail Already Block This?

Not really. Gmail routes remote images through its own proxy servers, which hides your true IP address from the sender and strips out the precise location estimate that early trackers relied on. That is a genuine privacy improvement. But the proxy still loads the image, which means the open event still fires and the sender still sees that you read the message. Gmail's proxy protects your location, not the fact that you opened the email at all.

To stop the open from registering at all, you need to prevent the tracking pixel from loading in the first place.

How to Block Superhuman and Mixmax Tracking in Gmail

There are three practical ways to stop these trackers, in order of convenience:

• Install a tracking pixel blocker. Gblock is a free Chrome extension that detects and blocks tracking pixels — including the ones Superhuman and Mixmax use — before they load. It runs automatically on every email you open in Gmail, so the sender's dashboard never logs your open. There is nothing to remember and nothing to configure per message.
• Turn off automatic image loading. In Gmail settings, under the Images section, choose "Ask before displaying external images." This blocks the tracking pixel along with every other remote image until you manually choose to load it. The trade off is that legitimate images in newsletters also stop loading until you click.
• Read in plain text. Stripping the HTML view prevents any remote image from rendering, including the pixel. The downside is that every message looks plain and links lose their formatting.

A dedicated blocker is the only option that keeps your inbox normal while still stopping the tracker. Gblock also blocks pixels from Streak, Yesware, and HubSpot, from Mailtrack, and from any custom pixel a sender rolls themselves. If you want the full landscape, see our guide to how to block email tracking in Gmail and our comparison of email tracker Chrome extensions.

The Quick Answer

Superhuman can track when you open an email if the sender turns the feature on, and Mixmax tracks opens, clicks, and document views as a core part of the product. Neither is malware, and neither reads your replies — but both report your reading behavior to the sender. If you would rather keep that private, block the pixel before it loads. In Gmail, the fastest way to do that is a tracking pixel blocker that runs on every message automatically.