I used Mailtrack for about eight months. It was fine. A little checkmark appeared next to my sent emails telling me someone opened them. Double checkmark meant they opened it twice. Cool, I guess.
But here's what I realized around month six: knowing an email was opened didn't actually help me do anything. Sarah opened my proposal four times. Great. Now what? Mailtrack doesn't tell me what to do with that information. It doesn't tell me when to follow up, or that she usually responds within 2 days but it's been 5, or that my Friday emails to her always get ignored.
It's a read receipt. That's the whole product.
What Mailtrack does well
Credit where it's due. Mailtrack (recently rebranded to Mailsuite) is dead simple to set up. Chrome extension, click install, done. Every email you send gets a tracking pixel, and you see open status right inside Gmail. The free tier tracks opens, though it adds a "Sent with Mailtrack" signature to your emails. The paid version ($9.99/month for Advanced) removes the branding, adds link click tracking, full history, and mail merge.
They've also added a basic analytics dashboard and no-reply alerts that nudge you when someone hasn't responded. So it's more than just a checkmark now. But it still wasn't enough for me.
Where it fell short for me
My inbox was a disaster. I'd send 30-40 emails a week, proposals, invoices, project updates, partnership pitches. Mailtrack would show me checkmarks on all of them. But I had no way to see, at a glance, which ones actually needed attention.
I'd scroll through my sent folder trying to remember which proposal was from 3 days ago vs 8 days ago. Which invoice was overdue. Which client I'd followed up with once vs not at all. The checkmarks didn't help with any of that.
I tried making a spreadsheet. It lasted two weeks before I stopped updating it.
The real problem isn't "was this email opened." The real problem is "who owes me a reply right now, and what should I do about it."
What's different about Pynglo
I'm obviously biased here, I built the thing, so take this with a grain of salt. But the core difference is that Pynglo organizes your sent emails by response status instead of just tracking opens.
When I open my dashboard, I see four buckets:
Ghosted, emails sent over 5 days ago with no reply. These are the ones that need attention right now.
Waiting, sent 1-5 days ago, or opened but not replied to. These are cooking. Give them time.
Fresh, sent today. Too early to worry.
Replied, done. Off my plate.
That changed everything for me. Instead of scrolling through checkmarks, I just look at the Ghosted column every morning and send follow-ups. Takes maybe 5 minutes. Nothing falls through the cracks.
The follow-up thing
Mailtrack has templates, but they're basic. You still have to open Gmail, find the thread, compose the reply, paste the template, customize it.
Pynglo has a "follow up" button right on each email. Click it, pick a tone (gentle nudge, direct ask, or final check-in), edit if I want, send. It goes out through my Gmail as a reply in the same thread. One click instead of six.
I didn't think this would matter much. Turns out, reducing friction from "annoying multi-step process" to "one click" was the difference between me actually following up vs putting it off until tomorrow. And tomorrow. And the next day.
What Pynglo doesn't do
Open tracking is limited. Mailtrack tracks opens on every email automatically because it's a browser extension that injects a pixel into every outgoing email. Pynglo only tracks opens on follow-ups sent through the dashboard, because there's no browser extension (yet). For emails I send directly from Gmail, I rely on reply detection instead.
Honestly, I don't miss the universal open tracking as much as I expected. Knowing who replied vs who didn't is more actionable than knowing who opened something.
Pynglo also doesn't work with Outlook. Gmail only for now.
The real comparison
Here's how they compare on the things that matter:
Who should use what
If you send a few important emails a week and just want to know if they were opened, Mailtrack is fine. It does that one thing well and the price of "free" is hard to beat.
If you're a freelancer or consultant sending 20+ emails a week and losing track of who you're waiting on, Mailtrack's checkmarks won't solve your real problem. You need a system that tells you what to do, not just what happened. That's what I built Pynglo to be.
I'm biased. Try both and decide for yourself.