Glossary
Plain-text first message
A plain-text first message is the opening email of a sequence, sent with no links, no images and no tracking, short enough to read on a phone.
The first message from a young mailbox is the one most likely to be filtered, so it carries the least that a filter can object to. No links, no images, no attachments, no tracking pixel. Plain text, a few lines, one question.
It reads like a person wrote it because a person did, and it lands better because there is nothing in it for a filter to score. Tracking is switched on later, once the mailbox has a history, and even then opens are reported with and without known proxies.
Sequences begin this way for the first weeks of a mailbox's life as a matter of rule, not taste.
Questions
How do you measure a message with no tracking?
By replies and by the deliverability reading. Replies are the only signal a filter cannot fake, and the reading says where the message landed without asking the recipient's client to load anything.
This term belongs to the outbound engineering glossary. The practice is defined on the category page.
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