Your open rates are a key signal for engagement, but with privacy updates like Apple’s iOS 26, they’ve gotten harder to interpret. Hive cuts through the noise to give you the most accurate, no-fluff view of who’s actually engaging
Open rates in Hive
Hive aims to provide the most accurate open rate for your email campaigns. To achieve this, recipients blocking open tracking through email clients (like Apple Mail or Gmail) are automatically excluded from open rate calculations.
To help you manage these recipients, Hive organizes them into a segment within your brand called "Subscribers Who've Disabled Tracking."
What are subscribers with tracking disabled?
In September 2021, Apple introduced iOS 15, allowing Subscribers to disable open tracking in the Mail app, preventing marketers from knowing if emails are opened in the Apple Mail app. Since then, other email providers have added similar privacy features.
As a result, open tracking is no longer fully reliable, and different email platforms now calculate open rates in various ways to adjust for these changes.
How is open tracking blocked?
When tracking is disabled, the email client (like Apple Mail), protects privacy by automatically preloading all images in the email campaign using a remote bot. As a result, the email appears to be opened even if the recipient never views it. Additionally, the bot hides the subscriber's location and IP address, making it difficult to determine whether a real person engaged with the message.
These bot-triggered actions, often called "prefetch opens," create misleading open rate data, making it appear as though a human recipient has opened the email when they haven’t.
How are open rates calculated in other platforms?
There are a few different takes on how open rates are calculated across email providers, all of which will produce different final open rate results.
Below are a few different ways of calculating open rates across the industry. The differences between all 3 come down to the approach of prefetch opens mentioned above.
Including prefetch opens: Some platforms, like MailChimp and Constant Contact, still count prefetch-triggered opens. This leads to inflated open rates because not all of these emails are actually seen by a human.
Counting "confirmed" opens from users with tracking disabled: Some providers exclude the prefetch opens, but still count “confirmed” opens from users with tracking disabled. This means subscribers with tracking disabled who didn’t open the email are not included in the calculation, making the open rates appear artificially high.
Including all recipients, even when open rates can’t be tracked: Some providers attempt to be more accurate by removing the prefetch opens, but still include subscribers with tracking disabled in the open rate calculation. Since these recipients’ actual opens cannot be tracked, the open rate appears lower than it should. This creates a misleading result, as the total number of emails sent is higher than the number of trackable recipients.
"Confirmed" opens - an email is opened by an actual contact and not a bot.
How does Hive calculate open rates?
Hive only includes subscribers we can confidently track so your open rates reflect real people, not bots or guesses. Here’s what that means for your data:
No inflated open rates due to bot-generated prefetch opens.
No underreporting caused by including recipients whose actual opens cannot be tracked.
Example: If you send 1,000 emails and 300 are opened, but 400 were sent to subscribers with tracking disabled, Hive will exclude those 400 contacts and say 300/600 = 50% open rate. This is more accurate because we’re only looking at trackable recipients.
In short, Hive calculates open rates as it did before September 2021, ensuring the most precise and reliable results possible.
Note: Open rates can be viewed for each campaign directly on the Campaigns page or in the Engagement Stats of your campaigns.