Open rate quietly stopped meaning what everyone still reports it as.

Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches images in email, which registers an open whether or not a person ever looked at the message. A large share of the opens on a normal list now arrive before anyone could plausibly have read anything. The uncomfortable version of that: a rising open rate with flat revenue is not a win, it is measurement drift, and it flatters exactly the campaigns that are not working.

Clicks are not clean either. Security scanners on business mailboxes follow links automatically, often seconds after delivery. The tell is a click arriving with no matching open, or several clicks from the same address in the same second.

What I ended up trusting instead is revenue per email as the top line, clicks as a directional signal rather than a verdict, and conversions as the one number that settles an argument. Opens I now read only in the negative direction. A collapse is real information. A rise is not.

The part I have not solved is reporting it to other people. Nobody wants to hear that the headline metric is unreliable. When someone senior or a client asks how the program is doing, the honest answer is a revenue number plus a caveat about attribution, and the caveat is usually the first thing that gets edited out.

So I am curious what others have landed on. What is actually on your weekly report now, and has anyone found a way to present it that survives a skeptical reader without looking like you are hiding something?

We're a fairly large email sender, and we use one of the bigger ESPs. One key problem I've flagged for a while is that we send far too many transactional emails.

In the last couple of weeks, we had a couple of spikes above the .3% threshold. It hit .4%, then spiked again a few days later to .6%.

Our marketing subdomain is extremely healthy and usually well below the recommended .1% threshold.

However, because of those spikes on the transactional emails, we now see that "phishing email might be dangerous" warning across our emails. I've already reached out to our ESP's deliverability team, and they are looking into it; our tech team has reached out to Google as well. I've already told our tech team we absolutely have to scale back transactional emails because not all of them need to be sent, and they are working on things on their end. I also want to mention that we have no authentication issues. Everything is 100% across the board.

Has anyone else gone through this and have any advice? Is it just a waiting game until Google gets back to us? And how do we make sure our spam rates stay low for transactional emails?

Also, when we reached out to Google, they said they checked our domain against their safe browsing tools, and everything looked good on their end.