Open tracking

An open is recorded when a mail client loads a small invisible image at the bottom of your issue. That is how every email platform measures opens, and it is why the figure is the softest number in email: an open rate counts images loading, not people reading.

Issue Mint reports opens because they are useful as a series, and says plainly what they are worth. If you only ever look at one engagement figure, clicks are the better one.

How an open is measured

Each recipient’s copy of the issue carries its own pixel, served from the same host as their links. The first time it loads, that reader is marked as having opened; later loads add to their own open count.

The opened figure on an issue report counts people rather than fetches, so a reader who reads on a phone and again on a laptop is one open there. The pixel is served with caching switched off, so a genuine second read is not swallowed by a cached image. The plain text version of an issue has no pixel, because there is nowhere to put one, so a reader whose client shows text only is never counted as opening.

Where to switch it off

Open tracking is a per-newsletter switch, in Settings, under the Subscribers tab. Some publishers think a tracking pixel is intrusive and would rather not have one, which is a perfectly reasonable position.

Off means off. No pixel is added to the message and nothing is recorded, rather than a figure being hidden from you. Figures already recorded against issues you have already sent stay as they are, the opened stage on new reports reads zero, and click tracking carries on untouched, since clicks are counted separately.

Why the number reads high

Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads images on the reader’s behalf, whether or not the reader ever looks at the message. So some of your opens are Apple’s proxy rather than people, and on a list with a lot of iPhone readers that share is large.

Nobody outside Apple knows how large. The fetch looks like a reader’s client, which is the whole design intent, and other prefetching clients do something similar. This is not an Issue Mint quirk: it has been true of every email platform since Apple introduced the feature, and any platform reporting otherwise is guessing.

Issue Mint does not subtract the proxy fetches

Issue Mint makes no attempt to guess which opens came from a privacy proxy, because there is no reliable way to tell one from a real open, and a confident guess would be worse than an honest high number.

What is filtered is traffic with no plausible reader behind it at all: scanners, crawlers and scripts, which are excluded from every figure. Mail providers that fetch images for their users, such as Gmail’s image proxy, are counted as opens rather than robots, because Gmail proxies every image in every message it displays and treating that as a robot would report almost no opens for the largest part of most lists.

Treat opens as a trend

Compare your open rate with your own open rate. Movement across your last few issues means something: a subject line that did noticeably better than your usual, or a month-long slide that is worth investigating.

The absolute level means very little, and it is not comparable with a figure from another platform, another year or somebody else’s newsletter, because the share of proxy fetches differs in every one of those. If your open rate has jumped or collapsed for no obvious reason, open rate looks wrong works through the usual causes.

Where opens appear

Opens show up in three places: the opened stage on an issue report, the opened column in recent issues on your dashboard, and each subscriber’s own page, which lists the issues they were sent and whether they opened each one.

They also feed the engagement segments on the subscriber analytics page, which count a first open or any click, so a reader with images blocked who follows a link still counts as engaged. There is no opens chart anywhere in Issue Mint, deliberately: a line drawn through a number this soft looks more authoritative than it deserves.