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Hi everyone,

My name is Gabe, and I'm an engineer here at Salesloft focused on our email channel. I want to address a concern among our users about potential changes to the Google email platform that might affect tracking pixels used to determine if someone opened an email.


To put your mind at ease, we haven't seen any evidence of Google blocking tracking pixels by default. However, what we have observed is that images can be blocked when emails are detected as spam due to domain reputation or email content. But here's the good news: if you're following Salesloft's email best practices, it's unlikely that your prospects will ever see this sort of spam banner message.
 

If you want to know more about how to avoid these issues and ensure your emails are delivered successfully, I recommend checking out our email deliverability best practices guide.


 

To add on here from the Channel Health Engineering team that supports our email, dialer and SMS core channels:

Google does not have a feature that is flagging emails with images as spam. The reason images are hidden is because the email was flagged as spam and therefore the images have been hidden as a way to protect users from generating any email content that could be malicious. If the email was moved back to the inbox, the images would load as expected or the user could manually display images.

Really the sender would need to take a step back and review why the email/domain was flagged as spam and check on deliverability health. If Google flagged every email that contained images as spam, everyone would be getting redirected to spam as Google cannot distinguish/detect an open tracking image from any other normal image in an email.

Unfortunately this post and news on Linkedin is causing a lot of unnecessary panic with something that is not necessarily accurate. There is no feature defined anywhere in Googles documentation regarding open tracking leading to emails getting flagged. If the only source of truth is from a posting on LinkedIn, then unfortunately, it’s spread of misinformation and cannot be verified.

Open Tracking is explicitly outlined in Googles Sender Requirements and there is no mention of it being viewed as a negative, only that it is unreliable and may not be a good indicator of deliverability & performance which has always been the case. See reference below:

  • https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?hl=en
    • Monitoring and troubleshooting
    • Open rate
      • Google doesn’t track open rates.
      • Google can’t verify the accuracy of open rates reported by third parties.
      • Low open rates aren’t necessarily an accurate indicator of deliverability or spam classification issues.

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