Should You Tell People You Track Your Emails?

The legal question has an answer that depends on your country and your relationship with the recipient. The social question is harder and nobody writes about it: if you track your emails, should you say so? We sell a tracker, so our answer is worth what you paid for it. Here it is anyway, including where we think it does not apply.

Table of contents

The question under the question

People rarely ask "should I disclose" because they are unsure of the law. They ask because they feel a small discomfort and want to know whether it is justified.

It usually is, a little. You are collecting information about someone who did not ask to give it. That the information is thin, a timestamp and nothing about them personally, makes it minor rather than harmless.

Pretending there is no tension is the wrong move. The useful work is deciding when the tension is worth it and when it is not.

Three honest positions

Never track. Perfectly defensible. You lose the ability to time a follow-up and you keep a clean conscience. Plenty of people sell more than enough without ever knowing whether an email was opened.

Track, never mention it. The most common position by far. It is coherent on one condition: that the information only ever changes your timing, never your words. More on that below.

Track and say so. Rarer, and stronger than it looks. A line in your signature saying you use read tracking costs you very little and removes the discomfort entirely.

All three are honest. What follows is about the failure mode that none of them includes.

The one thing that never works

Tracking silently, then referring to what you saw.

"I noticed you opened my email three times" is the worst sentence in sales. In one line you reveal that you were watching, that you did not mention it, and that you are now using it as leverage. The conversation stops being about your offer and becomes about your surveillance.

If you would be uncomfortable saying out loud how you knew something, do not act on it in a way that reveals how you knew. That is the whole rule, and it is a practical one rather than a moral one.

When you should disclose

When the relationship is long. With a client you will work with for years, a small hidden asymmetry is not worth the risk of discovery.

When the recipient is technical. Developers and security people notice remote images, and some will check. Being found out is much worse than having mentioned it.

When you write to consumers rather than to businesses. Expectations are different, and so is the law in many places. See tracking and the GDPR.

When someone asks. Answer plainly. Anything else destroys more than the tracking was ever worth, and we wrote about the specific case in when a client asks you to stop tracking.

When disclosure makes things worse

Announcing it in a first cold email is not transparency, it is noise. You are giving a stranger a reason to think about surveillance before they have thought about your offer, and they did not come to you with that question.

Putting it in a long legal paragraph at the bottom of every message is worse. Nobody reads it, and it signals that you think it is a bigger deal than it is.

If you disclose, do it in one short line, in your signature, in plain words.

The test we use

One question: would this person be annoyed if they found out, or would they shrug?

For most business email the honest answer is shrug. They receive marketing email all day with the same pixel in it, and yours collects less. For a personal message to a friend, or an email to someone in a vulnerable position, the honest answer is different, and that is exactly when you leave the toggle off.

This is why we made tracking a per email decision rather than an account setting. It is a judgement, and judgements are made one message at a time.

Conclusion

There is no universal answer, and anyone giving you one is selling something, including us.

What holds up in practice: decide per email, never reference what you saw, answer honestly if asked, and leave it off whenever you would rather the person did not find out. That last one is the only test that never fails.

Frequently asked questions

Is it illegal to track without telling?

It depends on jurisdiction and on whether the recipient is a consumer or a business contact. In the European Union the reasoning turns on legitimate interest and expectations. Our article on tracking and the GDPR goes through it.

Can the recipient tell?

A curious person can look at the message source and find a remote image, as in most commercial email they receive. No notification is sent to them.

What do I say if someone asks me to stop?

Stop, and say you have. It takes one toggle and it buys more goodwill than the data was worth.

Is a read receipt more honest?

Yes, because it asks. It also mostly fails outside your own organisation, which is why people reach for tracking instead.

Should I track internal emails to colleagues?

We would not. Inside a team the cost of being discovered is high and the benefit is near zero, since you can simply ask.

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