Vivaldi Mail Tracking: Does Vivaldi Mail Track Your Email?

Vivaldi Mail tracking is mostly a non issue, and that is the surprise. Vivaldi Mail is the desktop email client that lives inside the Vivaldi browser, and it does not add tracking pixels to the mail you send or report your opens to anyone. Its bigger story runs the other way: it protects you from the senders who track. Out of the box it blocks the remote images that marketing emails use to log when you read them. Gmail on the web, by contrast, loads those images automatically. Below: what Vivaldi Mail blocks, what slips through, what Vivaldi collects, and how to protect Gmail in a normal tab.

Key Takeaways

• Vivaldi's help documentation says "Vivaldi does not download external content by default," so tracking pixels in incoming mail stay unloaded until you allow them per message or per sender.
• Vivaldi's tracker and ad blocker is not documented to cover mail, and a Vivaldi Team member said on the company forum that, as far as they knew, it "does not affect email messages."
• Vivaldi's help pages describe no option to request or send read receipts, and long running feature requests on Vivaldi's forum ask for one.
• Vivaldi's browser privacy policy, updated December 15, 2023, describes a daily usage ping with a unique installation ID but says nothing about collecting mail content.
• Google says Gmail on the web shows images automatically by default, so the same tracked newsletter that stays silent in Vivaldi Mail can register an open at mail.google.com.

Does Vivaldi Mail Track Your Email?

No, Vivaldi Mail does not track the emails you send or report when you open the ones you receive. It has no open tracking feature for senders, and its own documentation never mentions one.

Vivaldi Mail is a standard IMAP and POP3 client. The Vivaldi Mail 1.0 launch post, published June 9, 2022, says "Vivaldi Mail does all this on your own computer, rather than on a remotely operated webmail server," and that "all your mails from all your accounts are indexed, therefore searchable offline." The product page lists it as free for Windows, macOS and Linux, so there is no mobile version to worry about.

Vivaldi markets the client on privacy. Its comparison with Thunderbird states: "Vivaldi Mail doesn't collect information about your behavior, and we make it difficult for others to track you." That is a vendor claim, but nothing we found contradicts it. That puts Vivaldi Mail in the same camp as Thunderbird, which also blocks remote content by default, and apart from clients such as Mailbird that sell open tracking to their users.

Does Vivaldi Mail Load Remote Images by Default?

No, Vivaldi Mail blocks remote images and other external content until you choose to load it. Vivaldi's Mail Settings help page says: "To protect your privacy, Vivaldi does not download external content by default."

When a message contains remote images, Vivaldi shows the notice "This message was prevented from loading external content" between the header and the body, with a button to load it. You then have three levels of trust:

• This message only: load the images once and leave the sender blocked next time.
• This sender always: the help page says "If you trust the sender, you can also enable always loading external content from that sender."
• Per contact: in the Contacts Panel, right click a contact, choose Edit, and tick "Always allow external content in emails."

Vivaldi tells email marketers the same thing. Its sender best practices page warns that "Vivaldi Mail blocks external resources from loading by default" and advises senders to embed logos in the message itself. It adds that Vivaldi Mail can convert HTML emails to plain text, rendering images "as their alt property text."

Does Vivaldi's Tracker Blocker Protect Your Mail?

Unverified, and probably not. Vivaldi's tracker and ad blocking help page says the blocker uses "lists of well-known tracker URLs" to stop trackers on websites, but it does not mention Mail or email at all.

The closest thing to an answer comes from Vivaldi's own forum. In a thread titled Ad and Tracker blocking in email client, a Vivaldi Team member replied: "As far as I know, the ad/trackers blocker does not affect email messages," and called it "a missing feature." We found no later official statement that changes that.

Here is the contrarian part. That gap matters less than it sounds, because the blocker is not what protects you in Vivaldi Mail. The external content block is. In a separate thread, How secure is Vivaldi mail?, a Vivaldi Team member explained: "We do not allow loading of external resources by default, so trackers will therefore not work." The same reply adds the catch: "If you allow remote content, then tracking will be possible." Scripts are disabled too, because of "the potential to send tracking pings."

Put those together and the real weak point is the "always load from this sender" button. Click it for a retailer whose newsletter you like, and every future email from that address can report your opens. A blocklist based tool would still filter the known tracking domains in those emails, but Vivaldi Mail has no such layer. It is all or nothing per sender.

Does Vivaldi Mail Send Read Receipts?

We found no read receipt feature in Vivaldi Mail, for sending requests or for answering them. Vivaldi's help pages on settings and on viewing and managing messages describe no receipt option.

Standard read receipts follow the IETF's Message Disposition Notification format, RFC 8098, which adds a request header to the message and asks the recipient's app to reply. On Vivaldi's forum, a feature request titled send email receipts, when email is received or read is still asking for the feature, and users in it argue that receipts clash with Vivaldi's privacy stance.

One caveat we could not close. Forum users believe Vivaldi Mail ignores incoming receipt requests, but no Vivaldi document confirms that, so treat it as likely rather than proven. For the Gmail side of this, see our guide to how Gmail read receipts work and how to block them.

What Does Vivaldi Collect About Your Mail?

Vivaldi's privacy policy describes no collection of email content, and its only regular data flow is a daily usage ping from the browser. The Vivaldi browser privacy policy, last updated December 15, 2023, says "each installation profile is assigned a unique user ID that is stored on your device," and that "Vivaldi will send a message using HTTPS directly to our servers located in Iceland every 24 hours."

• What the ping contains: the ID, browser version, CPU architecture, screen resolution, and time since the last message, according to the policy.
• Your IP address: anonymized by removing its last octet, with rough location worked out by a GeoIP lookup.
• Its stated purpose: "to determine the total number of active users and their geographical distribution."
• Gmail accounts: the only Mail reference in the policy covers Google sign in, saying Vivaldi's use of data from Google APIs follows Google's API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.

Gmail connects through Google's own OAuth dialog, according to Vivaldi's account setup guide, which adds that "since Vivaldi 4.3, the logins are kept separate, improving privacy," so signing into Mail does not log the rest of the browser into Google.

Does Gmail's Image Proxy Protect You in Vivaldi Mail?

Probably not, and that is the one way Vivaldi Mail can expose you more than Gmail does. Google's Gmail images help page promises: "Senders can't use image loading to get information about your computer or location." That page covers Gmail on a computer, Android, and iPhone or iPad. It says nothing about IMAP clients.

Vivaldi Mail reads Gmail over IMAP and renders each message itself. We found no Google documentation saying its proxy rewrites image addresses in mail downloaded that way, so assume that when you click load in Vivaldi Mail, your computer fetches the images from wherever the sender put them. That request tells the sender you opened the message, when, and from which IP address.

So the trade looks like this. Gmail on the web loads every image, but through a proxy that hides your IP. Vivaldi Mail loads nothing by default, but what you do load may come straight from the sender. The default still wins for most people, because most tracking emails never get a click, so be stingy with "always load."

What This Means for Your Gmail Inbox

If you read Gmail in Vivaldi Mail, you already have stronger default pixel protection than Gmail gives you on the web. Google's help page says "by default, when you get an email with an image, you'll see the image automatically," and adds that "sometimes, senders may know whether you've opened an email that has an image." Gmail's proxy hides where you are. It does not hide the fact that you opened the email.

The scale of the problem is not small. The 2018 Princeton study I never signed up for this! Privacy implications of email tracking found that "about 30% of emails leak the recipient's email address to one or more of these third parties when they are viewed."

Most Vivaldi users still open mail.google.com in a tab, and that tab gets none of Vivaldi Mail's protection. The external content block is a Mail feature, not a browser setting. A tracking link also works the same in both places: Vivaldi Mail does not rewrite links, and we found no Vivaldi setting that strips tracking parameters from them. Our explainer on email open tracking vs click tracking covers why that second channel matters.

How to Block Email Tracking in Vivaldi Mail and Gmail

Keep Vivaldi Mail's defaults, then add protection to Gmail on the web. Setting names below come from Vivaldi's Mail Settings documentation.

In Vivaldi Mail

• Load images per message: use the load button on the notice instead of trusting a whole sender.
• Audit trusted contacts: in the Contacts Panel, edit any contact with "Always allow external content in emails" ticked and untick it if you no longer need it.
• Read as plain text: under Settings, Mail, Mail Settings, Mail Rendering, choose "Text Only" to display all emails in plain text, which turns images into alt text.
• Hover before you click: check where a link goes, since no setting cleans tracking parameters out of it.

In Gmail on the web

Vivaldi says "extensions available in the Chrome Web Store can also be installed in Vivaldi," according to its extensions help page. A Gmail blocker you install there protects your mail.google.com tabs, not the Vivaldi Mail panel. Your options:

• Gmail's own setting: Settings, See all settings, then "Ask before displaying external images." It works, but every email loses its images until you click.
• Gblock: blocks known tracking pixels in Gmail while normal images keep loading, updates its blocklist automatically, and strips tracking parameters from links. It is a paid product.
• PixelBlock: free, with 40,000 users on its Chrome Web Store listing, last updated December 2, 2025.
• Trocker: free, with 10,000 users on its Chrome Web Store listing, last updated July 10, 2026.
• Ugly Email: the Chrome Web Store link on its website now opens an empty store page, and the Firefox add on was last updated March 6, 2024, so it no longer covers Vivaldi.

No blocklist catches every tracker. Our Gmail email tracking blocker comparison tests these options side by side, and our roundup of email tracker Chrome extensions shows the tools senders use on the other end.

The Quick Answer

Is Vivaldi Mail tracking you? No. It blocks external content by default, disables scripts in messages, and Vivaldi's documentation describes no read receipts. Watch three edge cases: senders you mark as always trusted, tracked links, and Gmail on the web, which loads tracking images unless you add a blocker.