You know the routine for cookie banners by now. Two European regulators have decided the same logic applies to something most senders never thought of as a cookie: the invisible pixel that tells you an email was opened.
MailPoet has controls for this now. Here is what happened and what to do about it.
What changed
Almost every email tool measures opens with a tiny invisible image, and measures clicks by routing links through a redirect. To register an open, that image has to read something on the recipient’s device. France’s CNIL and Italy’s Garante have both concluded that this puts it under the same ePrivacy rules as a cookie, which generally means asking permission first.
The CNIL published its recommendation on tracking pixels in emails, which also asks senders to offer a way to refuse tracking in the footer of every email. Its compliance date was 14 July 2026. Italy’s guidelines carry legal force and give senders until 28 October 2026. Both build on the European Data Protection Board’s Guidelines 2/2023 on when reading information from someone’s device falls under ePrivacy.
Two details catch people out. First, permission to track is treated as separate from permission to email: someone signing up for your newsletter has not thereby agreed to be measured, and the two permissions are given and withdrawn independently. Second, the rules follow the recipient rather than your business address. If you track people in France or Italy, it does not matter where your company is.
Whether any of it applies to your sending is a call for you, and for your privacy advisor if you have one. The rest of this post is about the tools.
What you need to do
First, check whether you track anything at all
Open MailPoet → Settings → Advanced and look at Engagement analytics tracking.
Set to Basic / None? Then MailPoet records nothing for anyone, there is no pixel to ask permission for, and you can stop reading. You also have no open or click statistics whatsoever, which is a steep price to pay for a problem you might not have.
Set to anything else? Tracking is on, and the per-subscriber controls below exist so you can keep it on for the people who agreed instead of switching it off for everyone. They work alongside the global setting, and they can only narrow who gets tracked. Nothing here will turn tracking back on for someone.
1. Add a tracking opt-out link to your emails
MailPoet does not insert this for you. Put it in your footer, near the unsubscribe link. There is a personalization tag for it in the new Email Editor and a shortcode for the Newsletter editor, both covered in the guide.
Add it to your template rather than to individual emails. Everything built from that template picks it up, and you stop having to remember.
You write the link text, so make it say what the link does. We suggest one of these:
- Don’t measure my opens and clicks
- Stop recording my opens and clicks
- Turn off open and click measurement
Each of these says plainly what happens, and none of them can be mistaken for the unsubscribe link sitting next to it. You do not have to use the word “tracking” if you would rather not: measure, record and count describe the same thing and carry less weight.
Avoid anything that promises a benefit instead of naming the action. “Improve your experience” and “Personalize my emails” sound friendlier but leave the subscriber guessing about what they just changed, and a choice nobody understood is not much of a record to rely on.
2. Decide what happens to subscribers who never answer
Same settings page, under Tracking consent for unknown subscribers.
- Yes is the default. Everyone gets tracked until they say otherwise. Most senders outside the EU will leave it here.
- No tracks only the subscribers who actively agreed. This is the setting for senders covered by the French and Italian rules.
Be ready for what No does to your reporting. Nobody on your list has answered a question you have not asked yet, so on day one your open and click rates fall off a cliff. Your subscribers did not suddenly lose interest. You just stopped counting.
3. Ask the subscribers you already have
Everyone on your list joined before any of this existed, so none of them have an answer on file. If you want to keep measuring them, send a short one-off email explaining what you measure and why, and link to your Manage subscription page, where they can tick “Allow tracking of email opens and link clicks”.
The ones who ignore it are not lost. They keep receiving everything you send, exactly as before. You just stop counting their opens and clicks.
What MailPoet handles from there
When a subscriber declines, MailPoet stops recording their opens and clicks. The pixel also stops being placed in their emails altogether, so for opens it is not a case of the measurement carrying on quietly with the numbers hidden from you.
Declining tracking is not the same as unsubscribing, and MailPoet keeps the two choices in separate places. Someone who turns off tracking still receives every email you send. They have not left your list.
Each answer is stored with the moment it was given, so you can show what you were allowed to do and when. Your automations follow it too: subscribers who declined are left out of re-engagement campaigns and out of the inactive-subscriber logic, both of which would otherwise judge them on activity MailPoet is no longer permitted to see. Statistics you have already collected stay exactly as they are. Only future tracking changes.
Full setup instructions, including where each control lives and what subscribers see, are in how to let subscribers opt out of email open and click tracking.
What we are building next
Right now the only way to collect these answers is to ask, once, by email, and the setup above is more manual than it should be. Both are being worked on. Subscribers will be able to answer at sign-up instead, through your forms, WooCommerce checkout and the API, and the consent field will travel with your subscriber imports and exports. You will get an admin view of who chose what, campaign stats calculated from the people you actually tracked, and less manual work when strict mode is switched on.
If you are not in France or Italy
You can leave the default alone and nothing changes for you.
Worth knowing that regulators tend to borrow each other’s reasoning, and the argument here is not specific to France or Italy. Adding the footer link now is cheap, and it means the next deadline is a settings change rather than a project.
Not legal advice
This post explains the change in plain terms, but it is not legal advice, and what you actually owe depends on where your subscribers live and how you collected their consent in the first place. If you are unsure, ask someone qualified. Our job is making sure MailPoet can do whatever they tell you.