Tracking
Track opens and clicks on the emails you send through Plunk
Plunk provides built-in tracking for email opens and link clicks so you can monitor engagement and drive workflows or segments off email activity.
Open tracking
When open tracking is enabled, Plunk includes a small invisible tracking pixel at the bottom of your email. When the recipient's mail client loads the pixel, the open is recorded as an email.open event on the contact.
Considerations
- Open tracking depends on the mail client loading remote images. If a contact has images disabled, no open is recorded.
- Some clients (and corporate mail security gateways) pre-fetch images, which can produce false positive opens.
- Apple Mail Privacy Protection masks individual opens — opens from Apple Mail are recorded but reflect proxy fetches rather than human reads.
Click tracking
When click tracking is enabled, Plunk rewrites links in your email body to route through a tracking redirect. When a contact clicks a link, Plunk records the click and the original URL on an email.click event before forwarding the contact to the destination.
Considerations
- Some mail clients and security tools pre-scan links, which can produce false positive clicks.
- The rewrite is transparent to recipients but means link URLs in the email source no longer match the original destination.
Configuration
Tracking is configured per project under Settings → Tracking. Three modes are available:
| Mode | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Enabled | Tracking is applied to every email. |
| Disabled | No tracking is applied to any email. |
| Marketing only | Tracking is applied to marketing sends (campaigns and emails sent by workflow steps using marketing or headless templates). Transactional sends — anything via /v1/send using a transactional template, or campaigns of type TRANSACTIONAL — are sent without tracking. |
Tracking is all or nothing within a single send — there's no separate toggle for opens vs clicks. Pick the mode that fits your privacy and analytics requirements.
Tracking mode availability
On self-hosted instances, the Marketing-only mode is only available when a no-tracking configuration set is configured. See Self-hosting → Email setup for details.