Matt PaulsonFounder and CEO of MarketBeat

Email Marketing: Open Rates Are Unreliable

5 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, Matt Paulson explains that email open‑rate metrics have become unreliable over the past five years. Some email service providers (e.g., Yahoo) block the tracking pixel that registers an open, while Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) deliberately masks opens, inflating the numbers. Consequently, reported open rates of 50‑60% are often misleading; before MPP, a 15% open rate was considered good. Because of these distortions, the email industry is moving away from using opens as a primary KPI and is instead focusing on click‑through rates (CTR) to gauge campaign performance.

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The thing that's really changed in the last 5 years is that open rates are very unreliable now because there are some ESPs like Yahoo that block open pixels, and then there are others that fake open pixels like Apple with their Apple, you know, the MPP, Mail Privacy Protection, opens. So open rates as a metric, you know, people will say they get 50, 60% open rates, and that's just not true. Before Apple MPP launched, like a 15% open rate was good. And now open rates are so inflated, they're just not really accurate anymore. So the whole email industry is really moving away from opens and moving more towards tracking click-through rates. And that's kind of what we're looking at now.