Why are my open rates inflated?
Apple Mail counts an email as opened before anyone reads it, so open rate runs high for every sender. Here's what to trust instead.
If your open rate looks higher than you’d expect, that’s normal. Apple Mail’s privacy feature, Mail Privacy Protection, loads every email’s tracking pixel the moment the message is delivered, whether or not anyone opens it. That counts as an “open” and pushes your rate up. It happens inside Apple Mail itself, so it inflates open rate for every email service a recipient with Apple Mail uses, not just EmailFig.
On a campaign report, the Opens figure already flags this. Hover over the “Opens” heading (the cursor turns into a question mark) and you’ll see: “Open rates are directional — Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates opens.”
What this means in practice
- Open rate is still useful compared with your own past campaigns: a big swing between two of your own sends still means something.
- It’s not a reliable absolute number, and not fair to compare against a benchmark or another sender, since the share of Apple Mail recipients varies from list to list.
- A recipient marked as having “opened” hasn’t necessarily seen your email at all.
What to trust instead
Clicks. A click only happens when someone actually reads far enough to act on it, and Apple Mail has no equivalent shortcut for the links in your email. Click rate, click-through rate (CTOR) and which links people clicked (see See who clicked a specific link) are a far more honest signal of whether a campaign actually landed. For the exact formulas behind all of these, see Metrics defined.