Your ESP finally admitted your open rate is fake

I'm writing this from the Delta Sky Lounge in ATL.

Tomorrow I'm speaking at the FMS Pro Accelerator, hosted at MarketBeat headquarters in Sioux Falls, with a room full of the sharpest financial publishing operators in the business.

So I'm finalizing this issue and pushing it out between boarding calls.

Maybe next time Matt Paulson can send MarketBeat 1 to pick me up in Palm Beach. I'll even skip the peanuts.

Fitting, though, that this week's topic is the exact thing I'll be putting in front of that room: the open rate you've been reporting isn't what you think it is.

Here's the thing.

Quietly, without a press release, the major email platforms conceded the argument.

They shipped new metrics. Machine opens. Human opens. Verified opens. Non-MPP opens.

Every one of those metrics is a confession.

If your open rate were real, none of them would need to exist.

Here's what actually happens when your newsletter lands in an inbox.

Apple Mail Privacy Protection preloads your tracking pixel on Apple's servers, whether the subscriber ever looks at your email or not. Security scanners at corporate domains open and probe every message before a human sees it. Image proxies fetch your pixel as part of routine processing.

Every one of those events lands in your dashboard as an "open."

Apple Mail alone now accounts for more than half of all tracked opens industry-wide.

Roughly half of what your dashboard calls engagement is machines talking to machines.

And it cuts the other way too. Images-off readers and plain-text loyalists read every word you write and register nothing.

Two distortions, running simultaneously. The dead get counted. The living get missed.

That's opener bloat, and it's structural, not an edge case.

The ESPs know all of this. So they've started splitting the open into tiers.

Here's where many of the major platform stands right now, and what the metric is actually called in your dashboard.

Braze draws the line explicitly. Reports can include or exclude machine opens, and its "Estimated Real Open Rate" goes a step further, statistically modeling human opens from click data.

Notice what Braze trusts to model reality: clicks. Even the open-rate fix runs on click signal.

Every open event in Klaviyo carries an Apple Privacy Open flag, true or false. You can filter it in segments, exclude it from engaged-audience definitions, and strip it from conversion tracking. It takes configuration. The default view is still the blended number.

But read Klaviyo's own documentation closely and you'll find the most honest sentence any ESP has published: when MPP is enabled, there is no way to distinguish a true human open from an automated one.

Sit with that.

Beehiiv filters most auto-generated opens, MPP preloads, image prefetching, out of your reported open rate by default. No configuration required. It also runs the same logic on the metric that actually matters: Verified Clicks strips bot and security-scanner clicks using IP, user-agent, and click-pattern signals, and shows you both the raw and filtered numbers side by side.

The cleanest split in the industry. "Human Opened" and "Machine Opened" sit side by side as separate metrics, MPP, Gmail prefetch, bots, and scanners firing within seconds of delivery all land in the machine column.

MPP and bot opens are baked into your open rate by default. There's a settings toggle that excludes them from reports and segmentation. Most senders have never flipped it.

Bot clicks are filtered out of campaign analytics by identified user agents. Opens? Still raw. Half the job.

Optipub has human opens as the reported number, with MPP opens and bot opens each broken out as their own visible metrics. One of the greatest visual and metric breakdowns on opens in the market.

The dashboard leaves machine opens in. But the event webhook flags every suspected MPP open with a boolean. The honest data exists, you just have to parse it yourself.

There's one filter no ESP will hand you, and it's the sharpest one available.

Timestamp math.

An open that fires within two minutes of delivery is not a human. Nobody sees your email, opens it, and renders your pixel in the first 120 seconds at scale. That's a security scanner. A proxy prefetch. MPP doing its thing.

Your ESP dashboard won't show you this.

But if you're sending through an API or SMTP layer, SendGrid, Mailgun, SparkPost, the raw event data is already yours. Delivered-at timestamp. Opened-at timestamp. One subtraction.

Anything under two minutes goes in the machine column.

It's the closest thing to a universal human-open filter that exists, and it works on any platform that exposes event-level data.

The ESPs building "human open" metrics are running variations of this exact logic.

You can run it yourself.

Here's the part the feature announcements skip.

A "human open" doesn't mean a human opened your email. It means the ESP couldn't prove a machine did.

An MPP-flagged open might still be a real reader on an iPhone. A non-MPP open might be a corporate security scanner the filter didn't catch.

Filtered opens are less wrong. They are not right.

Which is why the decision framework hasn't changed, it's just been vindicated.

Use filtered opens as a deliverability canary. A sudden ten-point drop in human opens means something broke: inbox placement, authentication, reputation. That's what the metric is for.

Never use opens, filtered or not, to decide who stays on your list.

Well… at least start there.

But that final decision belongs to clicks.

A click can't be preloaded.

I know, experts will say bot clicks run rampant. But here’s the truth if your list is mainly top level domains like Gmail or Yahoo (yahoo mx domains) there are less click bots and mostly real clicks are what is reported.

So in all intensive purposes, a click is a hand raised.

It's the reason the Base Sending Segment requires a click on record for anyone past the new-subscriber grace window. Not an open. Not a "human open." A click.

Your engaged audience density is measured in clicks.

Your sponsors are buying clicks whether they know it yet or not.

Your inbox placement is earned with clicks.

The ESPs just spent four years building metrics that prove the point.

Check what your platform calls its filtered open. Switch your reporting to it.

Then stop making final decisions with it.

See everyone at the Accelerator,

Chris Miquel

P.S. If you're not sure how much of your "engaged" file is opener bloat — subscribers your ESP swears are opening but who have never clicked once — that's exactly what a Smart Delivery audit surfaces. We'll show you your real engaged audience density and what it's costing you in inbox placement. Book a call if you want to see the honest number.