The itch: I send an email that matters, then I spend the afternoon wondering. Did it land? Did they open it? Is the silence a "no", or a "did not see it yet"? WhatsApp solved this feeling years ago with two blue ticks. Email, the tool I use for everything important, still leaves you guessing.
So I looked at the existing Gmail trackers. They work, but almost every one of them had the same catch: to show you a checkmark, they ask for full OAuth access to your Gmail account. Read the consent screen carefully and it says something like "Read, compose, send, and permanently delete all your email". That is a lot of trust to hand over for a read receipt. Your email content flows through their servers, and their business model has to justify that infrastructure somehow.
I did not want that deal, so I built BlueTicks for Gmail.
What it does
One tick when your email is sent. Two blue ticks the moment it is opened, in real time, directly in your Gmail Sent list and inside conversations. Hover to see the full open history. That is the whole product: the WhatsApp mental model, transplanted into Gmail.
How it works, honestly
Nothing exotic: an invisible one-pixel image is inserted into the outgoing email. When the recipient opens the message, the pixel loads, and that open is registered. This is the same technique every major tracker uses. The differences are in the boundaries I set:
- No OAuth access to your inbox. The extension runs in your browser, inside the Gmail tab. No server of mine can read your email content.
- Your own opens are never counted. Re-reading your own sent email does not fake a receipt.
- Nothing visible is added for the recipient. No signatures, no banners, no "you have not opened my email yet" reminder emails leaking into the thread. The recipient sees a completely normal email.
The limitation nobody puts on their landing page
Pixel tracking fails when the recipient blocks remote images. That is rare with default settings in Gmail and most clients, but it happens, notably with some corporate security setups. So the ticks mean "opened for sure" and their absence means "probably not opened yet", not "certainly unread". I would rather say that here than have you discover it after a misunderstanding.
Lessons from building it
- Working inside Gmail's DOM is a moving target. Gmail's class names are obfuscated and change; you anchor on structure and behavior, not on classes, and you build for graceful degradation.
- Real time matters more than I expected. Early testers said the moment a tick flips to blue while they are looking at the Sent list is the whole product. Polling every few minutes would have killed it.
- Privacy is a feature you can feel. "No OAuth" sounds abstract until you show someone the permission screen of a competitor next to yours.
Try it
It is live for Chrome and Firefox, with a free plan, and the paid plan is 4 dollars a year for Gmail accounts: https://blueticks.io
I am the founder, so take my enthusiasm with the appropriate grain of salt, and ask me anything about the technical side in the comments.
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