Email tracking - “opened” status broken?

[MikaelW]

Hi, 

I want to use HS marketing email capabilities for my company so I tried it earlier today with a few email addresses.

- First to one recipient
- Then, i cloned it and tried with two recipients.

(I used the HS website and all recipients were gmail addresses.)

The problem is that it shows emails as "opened" (1/1 and 1/2) despite the fact none of the 3 emails got opened at all, they are still unread in gmail inbox.

We haven’t opened them on any machines, yet HS says they have been ‘opened with microsoft Edge’. I’m on a mac and my friend here has never used Edge…

(note: the timing details also show them as opened at the same time they were sent...)

How could that 'opened' status be wrong? The "open" metrics is pretty fundamental, if it gives random false positive, that makes it useless.

It there an issue right now at HubSpot? Could it be that gmail scan of the email to categorise it triggers the “email image download” that HS uses to mark the email as opened?

What else could it be? As it stands, it is not reliable 😞

Many Thanks

Mikael

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @MikaelW,

Email clients might indeed open the email in the background to check for security risks or fraud. If the invisible one-pixel image is loaded during that check, HubSpot will register that as an open. This behavior is not exclusive to HubSpot, it's due to the nature of the tracking in general.

Best regards!