Gmail is where most tracking guides start, and most of them skip the one thing that makes Gmail different: Google fetches every image in every email through its own servers before you ever see it. That single fact breaks the naive way trackers count opens. This is the guide to tracking in Gmail that starts from there.
First, what Gmail does not give you
Personal Gmail has no read receipts. Google Workspace has an admin-controlled read-receipt setting, but it only works between accounts in the same organisation and the recipient can decline. If you are emailing customers, candidates or investors, that feature does not apply to you at all.
So the moment you want to know whether the person you emailed actually opened it, you need a tracker.
How real tracking works in Gmail
You install a browser extension. It hooks into Gmail's compose window. When you hit send, it inserts a tiny invisible image (the pixel) into the email and swaps your links for tracked versions. When the email is opened, the image loads and the tracker records an open. When someone clicks a link, the click passes through the tracker on its way to the destination.
That gives you the things read receipts never could: when the email was opened, how many times, on what kind of device, which links were clicked. Outsolvi's Gmail extension does this automatically for every email you send; there is nothing to toggle per message.
The Gmail-specific trap: the image proxy
Here is what most guides leave out. Since 2013 Gmail has loaded every image in every email through Google's own proxy servers. Your tracking pixel is an image, so it gets loaded by Google's servers, and the request that reaches your tracker comes from Google, not from the reader.
Two things follow. First, a basic tracker reports the wrong place: everyone appears to open your email in Mountain View, California, because that is where Google's servers sit. Second, the proxy can fetch the image more than once, so a basic tracker can show two or three opens where one person looked once.
The honest way to handle this is to treat a Gmail proxy open as a real open when it happens at view time (that is a person opening the email in Gmail; the proxy is just the courier), and to stop pretending it tells you where the reader is. That is what Outsolvi does: the open counts, the location is not invented.
The other Gmail trap: Apple Mail readers
Plenty of people read their Gmail account in Apple Mail on an iPhone or Mac. Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches every email's images the moment it arrives, whether or not the person ever opens it. To a basic tracker that looks like an open, at delivery time, from an Apple server. Apple Mail accounted for 62 percent of the opens Litmus measured in July 2026, across all senders, so this is not a corner case.
Outsolvi labels those as machine previews and leaves them out of your count. You still see them, so you know the email was delivered, but they never become "someone read it" and they never trigger a follow-up.
And the trap that is not Gmail's fault
If you email into companies, their security gateways (Microsoft Defender, Mimecast, Proofpoint) open every incoming email and follow every link within a second or two of delivery. That is true whether you send from Gmail or Outlook. A tracker that counts those tells you everyone opens your email within ten seconds, and every link got clicked. Outsolvi names them as scanner activity and sets them aside.
What good looks like in Gmail
Open any email you sent and, right under the subject, you should see the answer: tracked, how many real opens, how many clicks, what follow-ups have gone out, and a button to schedule the next one. No dashboard hunting. If a tool cannot show you that inside Gmail, it is making you do the work.
Setting it up
- Install the Outsolvi extension from your account. About a minute, no admin needed for a single user.
- Send your next email as normal. Tracking is on automatically.
- Open the sent email later and read the panel under the subject. Or open the dashboard for the full timeline of every open, with the reason each one was counted or not.
If you also use Outlook, the same account covers classic and new Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the web: email tracking in Outlook explains that side. Our methodology lists the rules behind every badge, and our research sources show where the numbers come from.
Want to try it against your own inbox first? The free trial is 14 days with no card. Send one real email to a colleague and watch what shows up.