Railgun Pixel
Most of the email you receive is watching you. Railgun Pixel shows you exactly who — right inside Gmail — and gives you the same capability for the mail you send.
- Mailchimpinvisible pixel
- HubSpotknown tracking service
- Segmenthidden image
Mail you receive. Nothing leaves your browser.
- First open09:41 · Lisbon
- ClientApple Mail · iPhone
- Opens3
Mail you send. Only when you switch it on.
Submitted for review. This page will link to the store listing the moment Google approves it.
See who is tracking you
Open any email in Gmail and Railgun puts a badge above the message. Click it for the company doing the tracking, the kind of beacon, and the exact domain it reports to.
Invisible pixels
The classic 1×1 transparent image that loads the moment you open the message.
CSS-hidden beacons
Images sized normally but hidden with display:none or visibility:hidden.
Known tracking services
A hand-kept list of tracking domains — Mailchimp, HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Yesware, Mixmax and SendGrid among them. It is not exhaustive, and is not meant to be: the other three checks are what catch the long tail.
Campaign tracking links
Images carrying the parameters that tie your open back to a marketing profile.
It sees through Google's image proxy to identify the company actually behind each beacon, rather than stopping at a googleusercontent.com URL — which is what most extensions in this category get wrong.
Know when your own mail is read
Switch on Track beside Gmail's Send button. Tracking is off by default and stays off for every message you do not switch it on for. There is no “track everything” mode, because there should not be one.
Opens, with context
Every open with its time, the mail client and device it was read on, and the country and network it was read from.
Link clicks
Optional, and separate from open tracking. Switch it on per message when you actually need it.
Forward detection
A new reader in a different mail client or a different country is a good sign the message travelled. A phone leaving the wifi is not, and Railgun knows the difference.
No phantom opens
Gmail fetches images the moment you press Send; Apple Mail downloads them for every message whether or not it is ever read. Railgun recognises both and counts neither, so an "Opened" from us means a person.
What a read receipt cannot tell you
Every product in this category oversells this. We would rather you knew before you relied on it.
- It cannot tell you who opened it. Gmail sends one body to every recipient, so there is one beacon for all of them.
- It cannot see opens in clients that block images. Many block them by default. No open is recorded, and a message that was read looks unread.
- Location is a country, not a street. It comes from the address the image was fetched from. A VPN puts it at the exit, and a Gmail reader shows as Google, not as themselves — and Railgun labels both rather than guessing.
A read receipt is a useful signal. It is not proof, and we will not describe it as one.
Two halves, two privacy stories
Blurring these together would be the easiest way to mislead you, so they are kept apart everywhere — in the product, in the policy, and on the store form.
Mail you receive
Nothing leaves your browser. Ever. Detection runs on your device and there is nothing to send — not the message, not the sender, not even the result of the scan. No account, no sign-in, no telemetry.
Mail you send
Only the messages you switch tracking on for are registered with your Railgun account: their subject, recipients, and any links, so opens can be attributed to the right message. The body of your message is never sent to us.
The extension asks for exactly two sites — mail.google.com, to read the message you are looking at, and api.railgun.chat, to register the messages you choose to track. Nothing is sold, nothing is shared, and you can delete any tracked message's record or disconnect the browser entirely whenever you like.
We are on our own denylist
Railgun builds both halves of this. We think both are legitimate — a sender is entitled to know the fate of a message they wrote, and a reader is entitled to know when it is being done to them. Those two beliefs are not in tension; they are the same belief. But selling both only stays honest if we hold our own product to the standard we apply to everyone else's.
So: api.railgun.chat is on the list this extension checks against, under our own name, beside Mailchimp and Yesware. A Railgun-tracked email arriving in your inbox is flagged exactly like anyone else's, and Railgun Mail's inbound firewall strips our beacon out of it the same way it strips theirs.
And our beacon is a 1×1 image that is deliberately not hidden. We do not use display:none to evade detection, which means other people's blockers can catch it too. A tracker we would hide from our own detector is not one we should be sending.
Pricing
- Tracker detection — free forever, and it needs no account.
- Read receipts — 100 tracked emails a month free, unlimited on any paid Railgun plan.
Related
The same detection engine powers the inbound tracking firewall in Railgun Mail, which strips these beacons out entirely instead of just naming them.
See Railgun Mail