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.
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.
Did this answer it? If not, email support — a human replies, usually within a day.