Email tracking metrics—especially opens and clicks—have long been a key part of evaluating email performance. But in 2025, these metrics are more misleading than ever, thanks to increasing privacy protections and evolving email client behavior.

Let’s start with open tracking. While it may appear precise at a glance—showing consistent trends over time—email open data is fundamentally flawed. Most inbox providers, like Gmail and Apple Mail, now use proxy servers to preload images, which triggers tracking pixels regardless of whether a human actually opens the email. This means that while your email software might say someone opened an email, there's no guarantee it was actually seen.

As highlighted in this article from Developer Media, open rates are increasingly obfuscated and should be considered a directional, rather than definitive, indicator. It’s best to rely on opens only as a relative metric—for example, comparing one newsletter's performance to another—rather than as a true measure of reader engagement.

Other articles reinforcing this point include:

Click tracking is beginning to face similar challenges. Obfuscation of clicks—particularly from bots and link scanners—is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Some users may appear to have clicked without ever opening the email, while others may never register a click at all despite engaging.

We began seeing this trend about two months ago and have been experimenting with various approaches to improve accuracy. While we’ve implemented some smart, conservative techniques to filter out bot traffic, it’s not a perfect science. There are still both false positives and false negatives, despite our best efforts.

This issue is explored in greater detail in this article from Bento, which dives into how inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo cloak real engagement from senders.

While the raw numbers are increasingly unreliable, the good news is that metrics can still be useful when analyzed over time and across sufficiently large sample sizes. Patterns can emerge, and even if the metrics aren’t accurate, they can still be precise—helpful in spotting relative trends and making iterative improvements to your campaigns.

In short:

As privacy protections evolve, marketers need to adjust expectations—and strategies—to stay aligned with what these metrics actually represent in today’s landscape.