Your own opens don't count.
Checking your Sent folder won't turn your own ticks green. Here's every protection working for you.
The classic tracker embarrassment: you peek at your own email in Sent and your tool cheerfully reports it 'opened'. MailViewed layers several protections against this:
- Send-time grace window — image loads in the first seconds after sending (your compose window rendering, server prefetch) are ignored.
- Sent-view detection — with the extension paired, opening your own Sent copy tells us to ignore the pixel load it causes.
- Mailbox-provider inference — for recipients whose mail isn't hosted by Google (Outlook, Yahoo, Zoho, company servers), we can prove a Gmail-proxy load was you, not them — this protects you even on your phone, where the extension can't run.
Sending to yourself is different. When the recipient is your own address, there's nobody to protect from your own view — you *are* the reader. So a quick self-test counts the moment you open it, on any device.
One honest limit: if your recipient is on Gmail or Google Workspace and you check your Sent folder on a device without the extension, your view and theirs are technically identical at the pixel level. No tracker can tell them apart there — on desktop, the paired extension covers it.