Most marketing emails — and even plenty of the one-to-one messages you receive — contain invisible "pixel trackers": tiny dots, often only one pixel wide, that quietly tell the sender every time you open their email. You never see them. You never agreed to load them. Mailbird Next automatically detects and blocks them so your inbox stays your inbox.

🛡️ Why this matters to you

A single pixel tracker is harmless looking, but it can tell the sender a lot:

• When you opened the email, down to the exact minute.
• Where you opened it from, based on your internet connection.
• How often you re-opened it.
• What device you were on — phone, laptop, or tablet.

And it's not just newsletters. Sales tools like Mailtrack, HubSpot, and many CRM platforms add the same trackers to ordinary one-to-one emails — meaning the person who emailed you may be watching exactly when you read their message.

✨ How Mailbird protects you, automatically

You don't need to do anything. The protection is on by default for every account, in every folder. When an email arrives, Mailbird Next looks at every image inside it and decides whether it's a real picture (a product photo, a logo, an illustration) or a tracking pixel. Trackers are blocked before they can call home. Real images load normally so the email looks exactly the way it should.

🎯 The shield icon in your message header

Whenever Mailbird Next blocks one or more trackers in a message, you'll see a small target-ring icon next to the message timestamp:

Hover over the icon and you'll see exactly how many trackers were blocked. Click it to see your options:

You'll notice the word "potential" in the popover. That's intentional — we'd rather be honest about the certainty. If something looks like a tracker, we block it, but no detection method is perfect. Better to block one disguised image than to let a real tracker slip through.

🔧 Your options when trackers are blocked

Clicking the shield icon opens a small menu with three choices:

• Allow trackers in this email — Loads the blocked images for just the message you're reading. The sender will know you opened this one, but the next email from them is protected again.
• Always allow from {sender@email.com} — Adds this specific sender to your personal allow-list so every future email from them loads with no blocking. The sender's full email is shown in the menu so you can be sure who you're trusting.
• Open Privacy Hub — Jumps to Mailbird Next's privacy settings if you want to change how tracking protection works overall.

⚙️ Your privacy controls in Privacy Hub

You can review and adjust all of your privacy settings in one place. Open Mailbird Next, click Settings, and then choose Privacy Hub:

The main toggle is Block sender pixel tracking — on by default. Turn it off if you'd rather Mailbird Next not block trackers at all (every email then renders exactly as the sender intended).

If you want to go even further, the Block all images setting blocks every remote image in every email until you choose to load it. This is the strongest privacy setting and also a great choice on slow internet connections.

🚫 A note about the Spam folder

Spam emails are higher-risk: phishing attempts often hide tracking pixels to confirm an address is real before sending more attacks. So in your Spam folder, Mailbird Next blocks all remote images — not just trackers — regardless of your settings. The "Allow trackers" and "Always allow from sender" options are also hidden for spam messages, so a phishing sender can't get one-click confirmation that you exist. If you trust a message that ended up in Spam, simply move it to your Inbox first, then make any allow decisions from there.

💡 Frequently asked questions

Will Mailbird ever block a real image by mistake?
It's possible but rare. We use several signals together — size, hidden styling, URL shape, recognised sender patterns, and file type — so real images with realistic dimensions and recognisable file names almost always pass through cleanly. If you ever spot a real image being mistaken for a tracker, just click Allow trackers in this email.

Will senders know they were blocked?
No. From the sender's side it just looks like you never opened the email. There's no notification telling them their tracker was stopped.

Does this slow down email loading?
Not at all. The detection runs in a fraction of a second before the email is displayed.

Do my settings sync across devices?
Yes — your settings and your allow-list sync with your Mailbird Next account, so they're the same on every device where you're signed in.

❓ Need More Help?

If you have any questions about pixel-tracker blocking in Mailbird Next, our support team is happy to help — contact us here and we'll get back to you quickly.