I am opening emails that are NOT tracked by Mailspring, but then immediately getting notification that emails that ARE tracked by Mailspring (involving the same email recipient) are being opened; notifications that 3 emails are being open, to be exact. Those emails are NOT being opened, but Mailspring is telling me that they are.
A read receipt is just a tiny image in the message, and Mailspring records an “open” any time that image gets loaded. Inside Mailspring, we strip our own pixel when you view a message in the account that sent it, so reading your own sent copy in Mailspring shouldn’t count. But there are a few ways an open gets recorded without the recipient actually reading:
- You open the sent message, or a reply that quotes it, somewhere other than Mailspring - your phone, webmail, another client. The quoted copy of your original still contains the pixel, so opening the reply loads it and it’s attributed to the original message. That matches what you’re describing: opening an untracked message from the same person triggering “opens” on the earlier tracked ones in that conversation.
- The recipient’s provider fetches images for them. Apple Mail’s privacy protection and Gmail’s image proxy both load images in the background, sometimes before anyone reads the message, and corporate security scanners do the same.
There’s no way to tell those apart from a real open on our end, so treat a single open as “delivered and probably seen” and link clicks or replies as the real signal. If the repeated notifications are the annoying part, Preferences > General has a “Show notifications for repeated opens / clicks” option you can turn off.