how we count
Some of your opens never had a reader.
Mail privacy features open every message they receive. Security scanners click every link. MeeReach counts them separately, and shows you exactly how many there were.
| Stage or leak | Messages |
|---|---|
| Active recipients | 12,400 |
| Leak: never sent | 310 |
| Sent | 12,090 |
| Leak: bounced | 214 |
| Leak: retries exhausted | 21 |
| Delivered | 11,855 |
| Opened by people | 3,920 |
| Leak: excluded as automation (Apple Mail privacy prefetch 2,184; Security / link scanner 351; Every link in the message fetched at once 75) | 2,610 |
| Clicked by people | 610 |
- never sent
- Stopped before it left us: a suppressed or unverified address, or a check that failed at send time. Not charged.
- bounced
- Refused by the receiving server and classified. Hard bounces suppress the address; policy and authentication failures don’t.
- retries exhausted
- Deferred by the receiving server, retried, and still not accepted when the retry window closed.
- excluded as automation
- Opens and clicks that no person made. Counted, shown to you, and left out of every rate.
- never sent
- Stopped before it left us: a suppressed or unverified address, or a check that failed at send time. Not charged.
- bounced
- Refused by the receiving server and classified. Hard bounces suppress the address; policy and authentication failures don’t.
- retries exhausted
- Deferred by the receiving server, retried, and still not accepted when the retry window closed.
- excluded as automation
- Opens and clicks that no person made. Counted, shown to you, and left out of every rate.
| Stage or leak | Messages |
|---|---|
| Active recipients | 12,400 |
| Leak: never sent | 310 |
| Sent | 12,090 |
| Leak: bounced | 214 |
| Leak: retries exhausted | 21 |
| Delivered | 11,855 |
| Opened by people | 3,920 |
| Leak: excluded as automation (Apple Mail privacy prefetch 2,184; Security / link scanner 351; Every link in the message fetched at once 75) | 2,610 |
| Clicked by people | 610 |
the leaks
Where messages stop.
The console names each one while a send is running, in these words. Live
- never sent
- The message was stopped before it left us. The address was suppressed or unverified, or a check at send time failed. You aren’t charged for it.
- bounced
- The receiving server refused it. We sort bounces into hard, transient, policy, authentication and unknown. Only a hard bounce suppresses the address; a policy or authentication failure is usually about the message or your setup, not the person, so it doesn’t quietly shrink your list.
- retries exhausted
- The receiving server kept saying “not now”. We retried until the retry window closed, then stopped and counted it here.
excluded as automation
Counted, shown to you, and left out of every rate.
Every open and click is checked before it’s counted. If a machine made it, it goes into “excluded as automation” with the reason, and your open rate, click rate, A/B winner and journey branches all use the numbers made by people.
Nothing is deleted. The dashboard tells you how many were excluded and by which rule, so a rule that starts misfiring is visible to a person instead of silently eating real opens.1
2,259 opens and 351 clicks were excluded as automation — mailbox prefetching and link scanners fetch tracking pixels and follow links without a person reading anything.
- Apple Mail privacy prefetch2,184
- Security / link scanner351
- Every link in the message fetched at once75
- Apple Mail privacy prefetch
- Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection downloads every message’s images when it arrives, whether or not anyone reads it. Those downloads come from Apple’s own network, so we can recognise them.
- Security / link scanner
- Company mail filters open messages and follow links to check them before a person does. We recognise the common ones by how they identify themselves and where they come from.
- Every link in the message fetched at once
- When three or more different links in one message are fetched within fifteen seconds, no person clicked them. We set aside every click on that message.
- Fetched too soon after sending
- An open or click in the first seconds after a marketing message is handed over is almost always a machine.
- Scripted HTTP client, crawler, no user agent
- Programs that fetch web addresses, and requests that don’t say what they are.
Footnote 1: We learned this the hard way, on a campaign where almost every “click” turned out to be a scanner. That’s when these rules went into every report.
Why our numbers are lower than your last provider’s.
If most of your list reads mail on an iPhone or at a company with a mail filter, a large share of your old “opens” were machines. They still happened. We just don’t call them readers.
A lower number you can act on beats a higher one you can’t. When you test two subject lines, the one people preferred wins, not the one a sandbox happened to open first.
What this doesn’t cover yet
Where the machine flag stops.
- Not yetThe flag in API and webhook data
- Events you receive through the API or a webhook don’t yet say whether a machine made them. The console’s numbers do.
- Not yetInbox placement
- We report delivered: accepted by the receiving server. We don’t measure which folder it landed in.