Glossary
Open-rate honesty
Open-rate honesty is the rule that opens are always reported both in total and excluding known proxies, and that no screen leads with open rate alone.
Open tracking works by loading a tiny image. Many mail clients now load it on the recipient's behalf, through a proxy, whether or not a person ever looked. A raw open rate therefore overstates attention, sometimes badly, and a program judged on it is judged on noise.
So opens are shown twice: total, and excluding the proxies that are known to prefetch. Neither number is allowed to lead a screen. Replies lead, because a reply is the only signal a filter cannot produce on its own.
The tracking pixel is also off entirely for the first weeks of a mailbox's life, when the plain-text rule applies.
Questions
Then why track opens at all?
Because the branch a contact takes in a behavioral sequence depends on it, and because the trend over time still says something even when the level does not.
This term belongs to the outbound engineering glossary. The practice is defined on the category page.
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