The short answer is “Yes.”

Regardless of whether it is a marketing email from a list or an email sent specifically to you by a salesperson, email trackers can be utilized to check whether you have viewed the email and if you’ve clicked on a link.

How you’re tracked:

• How email opens are tracked: The most common way track whether an email was opened is by utilizing a 1×1 image pixel. This is a tiny, unseen image that goes out to a server to load the image and is an indicator that, if it is loaded, you have viewed the image. Sometimes, these images URLs are specific to you (so they can tell Who opened the email) and sometimes they are not (so they can either track users without identifying specific users or simply count the number of people that opened them).
• How email clicks are tracked: The most common way they track if you’ve clicked on a link in an email is by utilizing redirects. This means that when you click a link, it goes to a URL that logs information before sending you to the URL of the link you wanted to click on.

Here is how you can prevent them from tracking you.