Why email opens and clicks are not always accurate

When you send emails, you can measure both opens and clicks. This is a great way to gain insight into how your recipients interact with your content.

However, it is important to understand that these numbers do not always reflect real user activity. Some recorded activity comes from automated systems rather than actual people.

For this reason, open and click statistics should be treated as estimates rather than exact measurements.

When we refer to systems or machines, we mean automated software that operates in the background.

These programs are commonly used by email clients and security solutions to protect users against spam, phishing, and malware.

As part of this process, they may automatically open emails or visit links without any action from the recipient.

As a result, activity can be recorded even though no person actually opened the email or clicked a link.

In recent years, several email providers have changed how emails are handled.

For example, Apple introduced features that automatically preload email content to improve user privacy. This can cause an email to be recorded as opened even if the recipient never actually read it.

Similarly, services such as Gmail perform automated security checks by visiting links to determine whether they are safe. In some cases, these requests can appear as genuine user clicks.

Automated systems often perform these actions almost instantly, which is one of the signals that can be used to identify them.

As a result, your reported opens and clicks may sometimes be higher than the actual level of recipient engagement.

To give you more meaningful insights, Lumant continuously evaluates whether recorded activity is more likely to come from a real person or an automated system.

This evaluation is based on a range of technical signals and behavioral patterns, such as how quickly an action occurs and other characteristics of the request.

Unlike many email platforms, which combine all recorded activity into a single set of statistics, Lumant attempts to identify and separate activity generated by automated systems. This helps reduce inflated open and click rates caused by email clients, security scanners, and other automated processes.

While no platform can determine every interaction with complete accuracy, this approach gives you a more realistic understanding of how recipients engage with your emails.

We also recommend focusing less on open rates and more on meaningful actions, such as clicks, conversions, and other indicators of genuine engagement.

Email open and click statistics will always be based on estimation rather than precise measurement.

Although Lumant makes every effort to identify and filter activity generated by automated systems, it is not possible to guarantee that every instance will be detected correctly.

For this reason, these statistics should be used as a guide to understand trends and user behavior rather than as a completely accurate record.