Every email tracker I've used tells you the same comforting lie: "✓✓ Read."
Then Apple ships Mail Privacy Protection, which pre-loads the tracking pixel on Apple's servers before the human ever opens the message — and suddenly "Read" means nothing. The tools kept showing the green checkmark anyway. They'd rather look confident than be honest.
That bugged me enough to build the opposite.
I'm building EmailKnow: an open-source Gmail extension that tracks whether your email got read AND acts on it — but refuses to pretend it knows more than it does.
The one rule that shapes everything
No fake certainty. When someone opens your email, EmailKnow sorts the signal into four honest states, not one:
- 🔥 clicked a link — the strongest signal a real human was there
- ✓✓ human open — a real open we're confident about
- ⚠️ Apple/proxy pre-load — the pixel fired, but it might be a machine, not a person. We label it, we don't count it as "read."
- ⧗ unknown — we're not sure, and we say so
That ⚠️ state is the whole product in one pixel. Competitors collapse all of this into a single green check. I'd rather show you the truth and let you decide.
It's not just tracking — it's the follow-up
Tracking that just sits there is a vanity metric. The point of knowing "they read it but didn't reply" is to do something about it. So EmailKnow closes the loop: you set a rule, and it sends a follow-up in the same Gmail thread at the right moment — driven by the signal, not by a dumb timer. "Read but no reply" gets a different nudge than "never opened."
The privacy stance (this is not marketing)
Because I read a lot of these tools' privacy policies and they horrified me:
- Your email body and attachments are NEVER read or stored. The backend only ever touches header-level metadata — subject, thread ID — and events.
- IP addresses are stored only as a salted SHA-256 hash. Never plaintext. I can't tell you where you are; I can only tell two opens apart.
- Minimal Google scopes: send, and metadata (headers only). No scope that can read your message body even exists in the grant.
- It's open source, so you don't have to take my word for any of the above — you can read it.
Where I'm at (honestly)
- Users: 0
- Paying: 0
- Revenue: $0
Backend and the extension are built and tested; the whole thing runs inside Cloudflare's free tier, so my hosting bill is basically $0 too. No launch yet.
I'm posting this early because the honesty angle only works if I'm honest about the journey too.
So, a real question for anyone who sends email that matters — sales, outreach, job hunts: would you rather a tracker show you a confident "Read" that might be a lie, or an honest "we're not sure"? I genuinely want to know, because that's the line the whole product is built on.
— building EmailKnow in public, #1
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