Honor email open tracking consent open-tracking-consent

On this page: Learn how to stop open tracking for individual recipients who opted out, while keeping it active for everyone else. You record the preference on the customer profile, then turn on Honor open tracking consent in your email channel configurations.

Previously, email open tracking could only be enabled or disabled for an entire campaign, and the same setting applied to all recipients. Journey Optimizer now supports recipient-level control through email open tracking consent. Open tracking can remain enabled for a campaign while being disabled for recipients who have explicitly opted out. The opt-out is determined from the preferences recorded at the email channel level or at the level of an individual email address, and it does not affect the recipient’s eligibility to receive the email.

To configure email open tracking consent, complete the following steps:

To learn more about CNIL expectations for tracking pixels, see CNIL guidance on email tracking pixels.

Understand open tracking consent understand-consent

Consent fields consent-fields

Preferences live in the Consents and Preferences field group of the XDM Individual Profile class, under the consents object. Adobe defines and maintains the field, including tracking.email.open, so you do not need to create custom fields.

Learn more about the Consents and Preferences field group

You can store the preference at two levels, which mirror the structure of existing marketing consent:

You do not need to fill in both levels. Choose the one that matches how your organization collects the preference.

Each open object contains the following properties:

How preferences are applied how-applied

For a supported delivery with the Honor open tracking consent option enabled, Journey Optimizer checks the channel-level preference and the preference of the identity selected for delivery. An explicit lowercase "n" at either level prevents open tracking.

Keep the following in mind:

Before you begin before-you-begin

Limitations limitations

For data model definitions, see Consents and Preferences. Review your collection experience and operating policy with your privacy and legal teams.

Who does what responsibilities

Your organization is also responsible for the consent collection experience, privacy notices, the choice of lawful basis, and data retention. Enabling the option does not collect consent, and it does not create a preference center control for you.

Populate customer preferences populate-preferences

Start by deciding whether each preference you collect applies to all of a person’s email addresses or to one specific address. Then update your existing source-to-XDM mappings so they write to the matching tracking field.

The examples below show how to record an opt-out at each level.

They are partial profile data, not complete ingestion payloads. When building your own payload, keep the following in mind:

{
  "consents": {
    "tracking": {
      "email": {
        "open": {
          "val": "n",
          "time": "2026-10-28T10:00:00Z",
          "reason": "Customer declined email open tracking"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

{
  "consents": {
    "idSpecific": {
      "Email": {
        "alex@example.com": {
          "tracking": {
            "email": {
              "open": {
                "val": "n",
                "time": "2026-10-28T10:00:00Z"
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Choose an ingestion method ingestion-methods

Write the values to your existing Profile-enabled consent dataset, using one of the supported ingestion paths:

For the first import, include every open tracking opt-out you have already recorded. After that, update profiles whenever a customer changes their choice.

Verify the merged profile verify-profile

Confirm both that ingestion succeeded and that the resulting profile is correct:

Learn more in the Profile UI guide and the merge policies overview pages.

Enable the option in email channel configurations enable-option

Once the profile data is validated, turn on the option in each email channel configuration that should apply it.

Before enabling the option, note that:

Apply the option to existing messages existing-messages

You can turn on Honor open tracking consent at any time. You do not need to edit the email activities in your journeys and campaigns. What you need to do for messages that already exist depends on the message type.

Validate before going live validate

After you verify the merged profile data, use controlled test profiles to validate the send behavior for each case:

For profiles with several email addresses, verify the address that is actually selected for delivery. Check that eligible messages are still delivered, and that recipients who opted out have no active Journey Optimizer open tracking in the test messages.

Before enabling production configurations, make sure that: