# Tracking (/guides/tracking)

Opens and link clicks on the emails you send can be tracked natively by Bitelio, giving you engagement data to build segments on and trigger workflows from.

## Open tracking

With open tracking on, each email gets a tiny invisible pixel appended at the bottom. The moment the recipient's mail client fetches that pixel, an `email.open` event lands on the contact.

### Considerations

* The pixel only fires if the mail client loads remote images — contacts who block images never register an open.
* Certain clients and corporate mail-security gateways fetch images ahead of time, creating false positive opens.
* Apple Mail Privacy Protection hides real reads behind proxy fetches: opens from Apple Mail still get recorded, but they reflect the proxy, not the human.

## Click tracking

With click tracking on, the links in your email body are rewritten to pass through a tracking redirect. A click first records an `email.click` event (including the original URL) on the contact, then forwards them on to the real destination.

### Considerations

* Security tools and some mail clients pre-scan links, which can register clicks nobody made.
* Recipients won't notice the rewrite, but the URLs visible in the email's source no longer match their true destinations.

## Configuration

Tracking is a per-project setting under **Settings → Tracking**, with three modes to choose from:

| Mode               | Behaviour                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   |
| ------------------ | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Enabled**        | Tracking is applied to every email.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         |
| **Disabled**       | No tracking is applied to any email.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        |
| **Marketing only** | Tracking is applied to marketing sends (campaigns and emails sent by workflow steps using marketing or headless templates). Transactional sends — anything via `/v1/send` using a transactional template, or campaigns of type `TRANSACTIONAL` — are sent without tracking. |

Within any given send, tracking is **all or nothing**: opens and clicks can't be toggled independently. Choose whichever mode matches your privacy and analytics needs.