Why is my email showing as opened, when I didn't open it?

To track opens we use a small image, often known as a pixel, at the bottom of each campaign. When the pixel loads, we make the assumption that the email has been opened and it's reflected as such in your EmailOctopus reports. 

There are some occasions where this can happen before you open it yourself. A small minority of email clients, firewalls, and anti-virus products automatically load the images within an email as soon as it's received, with behaviour is called image pre-fetching. As the pixel loads in both circumstances it's not possible to discern the difference between a genuine open and an image pre-fetch carried out by the email client – so while opens are a great indication of who is engaging with your emails, they're not necessarily always 100% accurate.

Following Apple's release of iOS15, you will likely see an increase in open rates, particularly for those contacts who use Apple devices  have updated to the new iOS version. iOS15 has made changes to the way they handle emails to protect their users privacy and emails delivered to a mailbox connected to the Apple Mail app (on iPhone, iPad and Mac) will have images pre-fetched while the device is using WiFi. That means emails may well show as "opened" even before you, or your readers, actually open the email. 

We're confident this won't affect any list hygiene procedures (such as removing those who haven't opened an email for X months). This is because Apple opens will only happen if the mailbox is active and connected to a Mail account. You can continue removing inactive subscribers by removing or suppressing contacts who don't open any of your campaigns in a given period.

Similarly, Google can also pre-fetch images under certain circumstances. That means campaigns sent to your Gmail contacts might be shown as opened even if the campaign wasn’t actually opened. This may result in higher open rates for Gmail mailboxes.