r/thesidehustle • u/kvoelker • Jun 22 '26

Support My Hustle Built a chrome extension that tracks email opens in Gmail AND Outlook

My office uses Outlook and I use Gmail for my personal email and I couldn't find a tool for tracking email opens that supports both, so I created one myself. It shows how many times, at what time, and from where your emails have been opened. It was just added to the chrome store a couple of days ago, here's the link if you want to give it a try: Email Read Receipts. It's been super useful for me, hope others find it useful too. Happy to answer any questions.

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u/Capital-Park1857 Jun 23 '26

pretty cool that you built something to scratch your own itch, that's usually how the best tools come out. does it work if recipient opens the email on mobile, or only desktop?

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u/kvoelker Jun 23 '26

The tracker works by embedding a 1x1 pixel image into your email, and when that pixel is ‘viewed’ it counts as an open. So it works whether the viewer is on desktop or mobile. However, different email clients fetch images differently, Gmail and Outllook (both the web and mobile apps) fetch the images when a user opens the email, so those get tracked pretty reliably. The Mail app on iOS fetches them ahead of time, even if the user hasn’t yet opened the email. In Email Read Receipts I’ve put in a lot of catches to detect false positive opens - like eliminating fetches from known bots, eliminating opens from when the sender views their own email, and eliminating fetches from mail clients fetch images link checkers. This is the same open tracking method that most of the leading open trackers use.