# Tracking (/guides/tracking)

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.

<Callout title="Tracking mode availability" type="info">
  On self-hosted instances, the Marketing-only mode is only available when a no-tracking configuration set is configured. See [Self-hosting → Email setup](/self-hosting/email-setup) for details.
</Callout>