·4 min read
How tracking pixels really work, in plain language
No mystery, no mailbox access and no magic. A walk through exactly what happens between hitting send and a receipt appearing on your screen.
Read receipts for any inbox
Know the moment
it gets read.
Seenbox adds read receipts to the email you already send. Paste one small snippet before you hit send, and you will see the exact moment it was opened, how many times, and on what kind of device. Unlimited tracking, free forever, and it never touches your mailbox.
- No card required
- Unlimited on the free plan
- Never reads your mailbox
Tracked mail
4 sent · 3 read- Priya RaghavanRevised scope + timeline for Q33 opens09:12
- Tom OkaforContract for signature08:55
- Hannah VogtFollowing up on Tuesday08:30
- Marco BelliniInvoice 2041 — due Friday7 opensYesterday
A list of four sent emails. Three show two green ticks meaning they have been opened, with the number of opens and the time. One shows a single grey tick, meaning it has not been read yet.
Works wherever you already write
- Gmail
- Outlook
- Apple Mail
- Superhuman
- Thunderbird
- Spark
A tick is the headline. The detail is the point.
Anyone can tell you an email was opened. Seenbox tells you how many times, when each one happened, what kind of device it was on, and whether they clicked anything.
Revised scope + timeline for Q3
to priya@northbound.co
- 09:41First openPhoneLisbon, PT
- 09:44ReopenedPhoneLisbon, PT
- 14:08ReopenedDesktopLisbon, PT
Three steps, then never again.
There is no extension, no add-on and no mailbox permission to grant. Setup is a copy and a paste, and it takes about as long as reading this sentence.
Open a free account- 01
Write the email you were going to write anyway
Nothing about your workflow changes. Open Gmail, Outlook or whatever you already use, and compose as normal.
- 02
Drop in your tracking snippet
Seenbox gives you a one-line snippet per email. Paste it at the bottom, hit send, and the snippet disappears into the message.
- 03
Watch the tick turn green
The moment your recipient opens it, the second tick lands in your dashboard and your browser tells you. No refreshing, no wondering.
The part nobody advertises
Email tracking is not a lie detector.
Every tracker on the market works the same way: a tiny image that reports when it loads. That makes it very good at telling you something happened and genuinely bad at proving something did not. Here is exactly where it falls down, so you can read your own dashboard properly.
- Blocked images hide an open
- Some people, and most corporate mail servers, refuse to load images. If the pixel never loads, we never see the open. A single grey tick means "no signal", not "they ignored you", and we label it that way.
- A mail proxy hides the place
- Gmail and Outlook fetch images through their own servers. We could show you a location, but it would be a data centre in Iowa, not your reader. So on a proxied open we show the time and the count, and leave the map blank.
- Not every reopen is a person
- Clients sometimes refetch an image on their own. We show repeat opens as their own events with their own timestamps, so you can judge a burst of three in one second for what it is.
A tracker that never opens your mailbox.
We never read your email
Seenbox never connects to your mailbox. It cannot see your inbox, your drafts, your contacts or the body of anything you send. It only counts requests for one tiny image.
Your recipients stay anonymous to us
We store a one-way hash of the opening IP address, never the address itself. It is enough to tell two opens apart, and not enough to identify a person.
Your data leaves when you do
Delete a tracked email and its receipts go with it, immediately and for good. Close your account and the whole record is removed. No export request, no waiting period.
People stopped guessing, then told us about it.
I used to send a proposal and then spend three days inventing reasons for the silence. Now I can see it was opened four times on a Tuesday afternoon, which tells me to call rather than email again.
Priya RaghavanFreelance strategy consultantInvoices are the killer feature. Seven opens on an overdue invoice is a very different conversation from zero opens.
Marco BelliniStudio ownerOne free plan that is actually free.
Unlimited tracking costs nothing and always will. Pro buys three things: the signature line disappears, your history never expires, and a digest lands each morning.
Free
Everything you need to stop guessing, with no card and no cap.
$0forever
No card, no expiry.
Open a free accountNo card. No trial clock. Free forever.
- Unlimited tracked emails
- Open counts and exact timestamps
- Device and location on every open
- Browser alerts the moment it lands
- Tracked links with click counts
- 30 days of history
- Carries a small Seenbox line at the foot of the email
Most chosen
Pro
Track invisibly, keep every receipt, and get the morning summary.
$4USD / month
Billed yearly at $48 USD
Choose ProCancel any time. Full refund inside 30 days.
- Everything in Free
- Invisible tracking, no signature line
- Unlimited history, nothing expires
- Daily digest of who read what
- Per-recipient open timelines
- Priority support from a person
Lifetime
Pay once. Keep Pro for as long as Seenbox exists.
$99USD, once
One charge. No renewal.
Buy LifetimeOne charge of $99 USD. Same 30-day refund.
- Every Pro feature, permanently
- All future Pro features included
- No renewal, no expiry
- Transferable to a new email address
Prices are in US dollars and exclude any sales tax your country adds at checkout. Upgrading is prorated; downgrading takes effect at the end of the period you already paid for.
Questions worth asking.
Straight answers, including the ones that are not flattering.
Every tracked email carries one transparent image, a single pixel wide. When your recipient's mail client loads that image, it asks our server for it, and that request is the receipt. We log the moment it happened, and nothing about the message itself.
It is genuinely free and it does not expire. You can track an unlimited number of emails, see every open with its timestamp, and get browser alerts without ever entering a card. The free plan adds one small line at the foot of your tracked emails and keeps 30 days of history. Pro removes both.
No, and we deliberately do not offer one. Extensions need permission to read everything in your mailbox, they break when Gmail changes, and most workplaces block them. Seenbox works by pasting a snippet into a draft, so it runs anywhere you can write an email, including a locked-down work laptop and your phone.
On the free plan, yes: there is a visible line at the bottom saying the email carries read receipts. On Pro that line is gone, but a technically curious recipient can still view the message source and see a remote image. Anyone who blocks images will also never trigger a receipt at all.
Because Gmail and Outlook fetch images through their own servers rather than the reader's device. The only location we could report would be the mail provider's data centre, which tells you nothing about your reader. Rather than print something misleading, we show the time and the count and leave the location blank.
Not necessarily, and this is the most misread signal in email tracking. Many people and almost every corporate mail server block remote images by default. A message that never registers an open may well have been read carefully. Treat a green tick as proof of an open, and a grey tick as no information at all.
It cannot. Seenbox never connects to your email account, so it has no access to your inbox, your sent folder, your drafts or your contacts. It only ever sees requests for the tracking image: a timestamp, a hashed IP address and a browser string. We store no message content because we are never given any.
Cancel from your settings in two clicks and you keep Pro until the end of the period you already paid for, then drop back to the free plan with your account intact. If you cancel within 30 days of paying, write to us and we refund the whole amount, including a Lifetime purchase.
Writing on email that lands.
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Stop sending email into the dark.
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