Most live email countdown timers are just an image URL. Every open hits a server, the server draws the current time, and you hope the inbox shows a fresh picture.

That breaks in a boring way now. Apple Mail Privacy Protection prefetches and caches the image. Gmail and Outlook still do not run JavaScript. So the live clock is often wrong, frozen, or a gray box, and the marketer thinks they did something wrong.

We ran into this while building Countdown for Email (not live on Product Hunt yet). The job is not draw a clock. The job is put a branded deadline in Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or HubSpot that still looks like a timer when the inbox caches the image. That is why we are shipping animated GIFs with a visual designer and a paste-in embed, not a new ESP.

We are still locking defaults before launch, so this is a real ask, not a teaser: