Enhanced email tracker protection in Proton Mail
Enhanced tracking protection in Proton Mail blocks spy pixels (email trackers) to protect your privacy from email senders, giving you greater peace of mind. This feature is enabled by default on the Proton Mail web, iPhone, and iPad apps.
On our web app, Proton Mail gives you added protection by removing known tracking links from links in your emails.
- What is email tracking?
- How Proton Mail blocks email trackers
- Tracking pixels
- Tracking links
- See tracker protection in action
- Manage email tracker protection settings
What is email tracking?
Companies often include email trackers in newsletters and other markMany emails include hidden tracking technologies designed to collect information about recipients, such as:
- Tracking pixels: Invisible images that notify the sender when an email is opened.
- Tracking links: URLs with tracking parameters that record when and where a link is clicked.
These techniques can reveal details like your IP address, device type, and email open activity — often without your consent.
How Proton Mail blocks email trackers
Proton Mail’s enhanced tracking protection protects your privacy in two ways:
- Spy pixel protection: We remove known email trackers whenever you receive an email. We also pre-load other remote images on your behalf using a proxy with a generic IP address and geolocation. This hides your personal information and the exact time you opened the email. Images are cached for a few days for faster, secure access.
- Tracking links protection (web app only): On the Proton Mail web app, we also “clean” the links in your emails, removing any known UTM or other tracking parameters from the URLs. So you can click these links without the sender monitoring your behavior. Here’s an example of a tracking link before and after cleaning.
See tracker protection in action
When Proton Mail detects trackers in an email, you’ll see a tracker protection badge at the top of the message on the web and desktop apps showing how many trackers were blocked and how many links were cleaned.
The number on the icon (9 in the example below) indicates the total number of email trackers blocked and links “cleaned”.
When using Proton Mail on your Android or iOS device, you can check if spy pixels were found and blocked on an email by expanding the details section, which you can do by tapping on the downwards arrow next to the To: field.
In the details view, you’ll see how many trackers were blocked or links were cleaned.
Tap Learn more to view more details about what was blocked.
Manage email tracker protection settings
You can control email tracker protection from the Privacy and security settings in Proton Mail, on both the web app and on mobile.
To manage this setting:
- Open Settings
- Go to privacy settings
- Toggle Block email tracking
Enhanced tracking protection FAQs
If Proton can intercept remote images inside my email, can Proton read my emails?
To protect you, we now load remote images in your emails using our servers as we receive them rather than when you open them.
This applies to emails you receive that are not end-to-end encrypted, such as most newsletters and promotional emails. These emails have already been checked for spam, phishing, and malware before arriving in your inbox, so we simply added tracking protection to existing automated filters.
Emails are then stored in your inbox with zero-access encryption, and we can no longer access them.
Learn about end-to-end-encryption when using Proton Mail
Should I still prevent remote content from loading automatically?
It’s safe to automatically load remote content when email tracking is blocked. This allows you to enjoy the extra context provided by images while staying safe from trackers.
Note: This is now the default setting. But if you’ve disabled it, you can re-enable it again by following the steps in the article linked below. This switch is not synced across our apps, so you can choose the preferred setting on each of your devices.
Learn more about loading images in Proton Mail
How can you protect me from tracking links in my emails if they’re encrypted?
We remove tracking parameters from links client-side, meaning email contents such as links are only decrypted and cleaned once you’re logged in.
How do you know which tracking links to block?
We maintain our own link detection list and also use open-source block lists that are continuously updated.
I can see links in an email have tracking parameters, so why does it say “No links cleaned” when I click on the shield icon?
Proton Mail blocks known tracking parameters that we’re aware of. However, many companies use their own tracking parameters, which can make it hard for us to detect them.
In addition, removing tracking parameters from a link sometimes means it no longer works. If you believe we missed some tracking parameters, you can submit a bug report to let our team know.