Why Email Open Rates Are Unreliable (And What to Track)
Apple Mail Privacy Protection, image proxies and security scanners have broken open tracking. What's inflating your numbers, and what to track instead.
Open rate used to be the first number anyone checked after a campaign. Today it's the least trustworthy. If your open rates look suspiciously high — or oddly similar across very different campaigns — you're not imagining it. Here's why, and what to measure instead.
How open tracking works
Email tools track opens by adding a tiny invisible image to each message. When the recipient's email client downloads that image, the tool records an open. The method depends entirely on the image being loaded because a person is reading the email — and that assumption no longer holds.
What broke it
Apple Mail Privacy Protection
Since Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection in 2021, Apple Mail can download remote content — including tracking images — in the background, whether or not the user reads the message. Recipients who use it can register as opens for emails they never looked at.
Image proxies and caching
Gmail and other providers fetch images through their own proxy servers. That hides the reader's location and device, and caching means repeat opens may not be counted accurately.
Security scanners
Corporate email security tools often open messages and follow links to check them for threats. That can produce opens and clicks within seconds of sending, before any person has seen the email — and it skews B2B campaigns in particular, since business domains are the most likely to run these filters.
Blocked images
In the other direction, some people and organisations block images by default, so genuine reads are never counted at all.
What to track instead
- Reply rate — the clearest sign that a real person read the email and cared enough to respond.
- Positive reply rate — replies that show interest. A campaign full of "not interested" replies is telling you something different from one full of questions.
- Meetings booked per 100 contacts — the metric that ties outreach to pipeline.
- Bounce rate — a direct measure of list quality and an early warning for deliverability trouble.
- Unsubscribes and complaints — rising numbers mean your targeting or message is off.
When opens are still useful
Open data isn't worthless — it's directional. A sudden collapse in opens across every campaign strongly suggests your emails are landing in spam, and very low opens on a single campaign can point to a weak subject line or a damaged sending domain. Use opens to spot problems, never to declare a winner.
Should you turn open tracking off?
Some teams disable open tracking on cold campaigns to keep emails as plain as possible, and rely on replies instead. If you keep it on, don't let it drive decisions. In Swyftreach, open and click tracking can be switched on or off for each campaign, and the Master Inbox's AI labels make positive replies easy to count.