For twenty years, open rate has been the metric everyone quotes when they talk about email performance. It's intuitive, it's a clean percentage, and it feels like it measures whether your email worked. The problem is that it never measured that very well — and privacy changes have now made it close to meaningless. If your email strategy is built on optimizing open rates, you're optimizing a number that doesn't track what you think it does.
Here's why open rates lie, and what to measure instead.
Email open rates are unreliable and increasingly meaningless — privacy changes broke the tracking, and they never measured real success anyway.
What you need to know:
Stop optimizing opens. Optimize for what people actually do.
An email "open" isn't directly observable — there's no signal that fires when someone reads an email. So open tracking uses a workaround: a tiny invisible image (a "tracking pixel") embedded in the email. When the email client loads that image from the sender's server, the sender records an "open." That's the entire mechanism, and it's fragile in both directions.
It under-counts when clients block images by default, which many do — a person can read your entire email and never trigger the pixel, so it registers as unopened. It over-counts when clients pre-load images automatically, registering an "open" for emails the recipient never looked at. Either way, the pixel isn't measuring whether someone read your email; it's measuring whether their client happened to load an image, which correlates loosely with reading at best. The metric was always a proxy built on a hack, and the hack was never reliable.
Whatever fragile signal open tracking once provided, recent privacy changes have largely destroyed it. The biggest is Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, which pre-loads email images — including tracking pixels — regardless of whether the user opens the email. For the large share of recipients on Apple Mail, that means a recorded "open" for essentially every email you send, opened or not. Your open rate gets inflated with phantom opens that represent nothing.
| What inflates opens | What suppresses opens |
|---|---|
| Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-loading | Image blocking by default |
| Bot/security scanners loading pixels | Plain-text reading |
| Prefetching by privacy proxies | Pixel stripped by the client |
The result is an open rate that's simultaneously inflated by auto-loading and suppressed by blocking — noise in both directions, with no way to disentangle them. A 50% open rate might be 20% real opens plus 30% phantom pre-loads, or something else entirely; you genuinely can't tell. This is a textbook vanity metric: it moves, it's easy to report, and it doesn't reliably reflect anything real. Optimizing subject lines to lift open rate is optimizing against a number that's mostly measurement artifact.
Even if open tracking were perfectly accurate, it would still be the wrong thing to optimize — because an open was never a meaningful outcome. Opening an email tells you almost nothing: it doesn't mean the person read it, doesn't mean they cared, doesn't mean they did anything. It's the lowest-value action a recipient can take, one notch above deleting. Building strategy around maximizing opens optimizes for attention you can't use rather than action that matters.
The metrics that actually matter measure what people do: clicks (they were interested enough to act), replies (they engaged directly), and conversions (they took the action the email existed to drive). These are harder to inflate, more meaningful, and tied to real outcomes. A campaign with a lower "open rate" but more clicks and conversions is unambiguously more successful than one with a high open rate and no downstream action — yet open-rate optimization would rank them backward. The discipline here is the same one that separates real outreach results from theater: measure the action that produces value, not the proxy that's easy to count. Effective email automation and outreach lives or dies on replies and conversions, not on how many pixels loaded.
To run email on metrics that actually mean something:
The throughline: open rate is a proxy built on a fragile hack, broken further by privacy changes, that never measured a meaningful outcome to begin with. It's inflated by auto-loading, suppressed by blocking, and disconnected from whether your email actually worked. Stop optimizing it. Measure clicks, replies, and conversions — the actions that reflect real engagement and tie to real results — and you'll be steering by signal instead of by noise.
Q: Why can't I trust my email open rate anymore? Because open tracking relies on an invisible pixel that the email client must load, and privacy changes have broken that signal in both directions. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection pre-loads images regardless of whether the email is opened, inflating opens with phantom events; meanwhile, image-blocking clients suppress real opens. Your open rate is now a mix of inflated and suppressed counts with no way to separate them, so it doesn't reliably measure whether anyone read your email.
Q: Was open rate ever a reliable metric? Not very. It was always a proxy built on a hack — a tracking pixel that registers an "open" only when the client loads an image, which correlates loosely with reading at best. It under-counted when clients blocked images and over-counted when they pre-loaded them, long before recent privacy changes made things worse. And even at its most accurate, an open was never a meaningful outcome: it doesn't mean read, cared, or acted.
Q: What should I measure instead of opens? Measure what people actually do: clicks (interested enough to act), replies (direct engagement), and conversions (the action the email exists to drive). These are harder to inflate, more meaningful, and tied to real outcomes. Judge campaigns by these downstream actions, not by open rate — a campaign with lower opens but more clicks and conversions is genuinely more successful, even though open-rate optimization would rank it backward.
Email open rates are lying to you. The metric was always a proxy built on a fragile tracking-pixel hack, and privacy changes — Apple's Mail Privacy Protection chief among them — have inflated it with phantom opens while image-blocking suppresses real ones. The number you see is noise in both directions, with no way to recover the real signal.
Worse, an open was never the outcome that mattered. It doesn't mean read, cared, or acted. So stop optimizing opens and measure what people actually do: clicks, replies, and conversions — actions that reflect genuine engagement and tie to real results. A campaign with lower opens but more downstream action is the better campaign. Steer by signal, not by a number that's mostly measurement artifact.
I went from 200 to 11,000 subscribers without hiring anyone. AI didn't write my newsletter — it did everything around it.
One idea a week to a published issue in under an hour. The boring system behind a newsletter I never dread sending.
No following, no network, no luck. Just an unglamorous system I ran for eighteen months. Here's exactly what I did.
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