Anyone who tells you their email open rate is 47.3% is, at best, rounding.
The number isn’t lying on purpose. It just isn’t a count of human beings reading your email. It’s the count of a 1×1 pixel image being loaded by something, somewhere, which used to be a reasonable proxy for “a person opened this”, and increasingly isn’t.
This post is the long version of a candid line we put in the SendTidings reports themselves: opens are directional, not precise. Here’s why that matters and how to use the number honestly.
What broke open tracking
Apple broke it first. Since 2021, Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches every image in every email sent to iCloud Mail and the default iOS Mail app. Every image. Whether the recipient opened the email or not. So if your client list skews Apple — and these days it usually does — your open rate looks suspiciously healthy. Half of those opens never happened. The pixel just fired anyway.
Then in the other direction: Outlook on desktop, Gmail with images disabled, anyone reading in plain-text mode, anyone behind a strict corporate firewall: pixel never loads, badge stays at Delivered, and the human read every word of your report without leaving a trace.
And then there’s forwarding. Your client gets the report, sends it to their boss, the boss opens it. Pixel fires under your client’s address. One recorded open, two readers. Or no open and three readers, depending on how the forward gets handled.
The signal lies in both directions. Sometimes by a lot.
What the Opened badge actually means
When you see the Opened badge on a SendTidings report, it means one thing only: a tracking pixel loaded somewhere. That’s it. Not “they read it”. Not “they engaged”. Not even “they saw it”. Just “their email client requested a tiny image from our server”.
We could call it Pixel loaded to be technically honest, but Opened is the convention every email tool uses, and the convention is the convention. What we can do is be straight with you about what the convention has come to mean.
How to read the number honestly
A few rules that have served me well:
- Compare against your own baseline, not industry benchmarks. If your reports usually sit at 65% opens and one drops to 25%, that’s a signal. The absolute number is meaningless on its own.
- Trust clicks over opens. A click is an actual human action. An open is, increasingly, a robot pre-fetching for privacy.
- Don’t pitch open rates to clients as a success metric. It’ll bite you. Some month a client’s nephew will read an article about Mail Privacy Protection and you’ll spend the next meeting explaining the difference between an opened pixel and a verified human read.
- If the badge isn’t appearing at all, that’s a setup issue, not a tracking-honesty issue. Different problem. Different post.
Why we surface the badge anyway
If the signal’s this noisy, why not just hide it?
Because directional is better than nothing. A rough “this report is roughly on-track / something’s odd” signal is worth a tiny pixel. We just want to be straight about what that signal can tell you, and what it can’t.
The reports are designed to live in your clients’ inboxes quietly. The open rate is a soft pulse, not a pulse oximeter. Use it accordingly. And if you want a metric that will tell you something, watch clicks instead.
