Turn email tracking on or off per individual email

Earlier this year we launched email tracking in beta. It gives you insight into your email performance, think open rates and click rates. From today, tracking is available for all accounts, and you can now also turn it on or off per individual email, independent of your route settings.

France's data protection authority CNIL (Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés) recently published a recommendation on tracking pixels in emails. Further on we explain what this means and how to handle it as a sender.

Email tracking for all accounts

Since the beta we have tested and improved email tracking. Bot detection was added, distinguishing emails that were genuinely opened by a recipient from automated requests by security scanners or Apple Mail Privacy Protection.

Email tracking is now available on all plans. You enable it via the route settings in your dashboard. Tracking is off by default and works fully opt-in. More about how tracking works and what you need to know about GDPR can be found in our previous changelog.

Override tracking per email

Tracking is configured per route. That works well if you want to measure email performance for all your broadcast emails, for example. But not every recipient has given consent for tracking. Because a tracking pixel reads information from the recipient's device, consent is required under the ePrivacy Directive. Overriding tracking per email turns it off for an individual email, without changing your route settings.

This is especially relevant since CNIL published a recommendation on tracking pixels in emails on April 14, 2026. A tracking pixel requires prior consent from the recipient. If you send emails to recipients in France, this recommendation applies to you regardless of where your business is based.

Inserting tracking pixels in emails requires prior consent from the recipient.

How does it work?

A recipient has not given consent for tracking, but your route has tracking enabled. Via the API it looks like this:

          {
  "from": "sender@yourdomain.com",
  "to": ["recipient@example.com"],
  "subject": "Your weekly update",
  "html": "<p>Here's what happened this week.</p>",
  "settings": {
    "track_opens": false,
    "track_clicks": false
  }
}

        

Sending via SMTP? Use the following headers:

      X-LM-Override-Track-Opens: false
X-LM-Override-Track-Clicks: false

    

We will be adding this functionality to our SDKs for PHP, Laravel, Node.js, Python, Go and Java soon.

The setting applies to that specific email only and takes precedence over your route's default settings. More details in the documentation for open tracking and click tracking.

Conclusion

Email tracking is available for all accounts from today. By overriding tracking per individual email you have full control over when open and click tracking is active, even when not every recipient has given consent.

The CNIL recommendation makes clear that tracking in emails is not a given. As a European email provider we take privacy seriously. Tracking is off by default, works opt-in and gives you the tools to stay compliant.