Open tracking seems useful—you naturally want to know if people read your emails. But the technology behind it is flawed. Tracking relies on loading a tiny hidden image: if someone opens the email, their email app loads this image, and you count that as an “open.”

But the open rate this produces isn’t reliable. Apple Mail now loads all images automatically, even if the recipient never looks at your email—so your open rate looks artificially high. Gmail sometimes blocks images, causing real opens to go uncounted—making your open rate misleadingly low.

Even worse, adding these tracking images can hurt your deliverability. Spam filters see hidden images as a red flag. Gmail sometimes puts a big warning at the top of your email, telling people it looks suspicious and giving them a one-click button to mark you as spam. The best senders—the ones who always land in the primary inbox—send plain-text emails. If you want your emails to get through, do what they do: keep it simple, skip the tricks, and write like a real person.

At Za-zu, we tackle this differently. Instead of blindly tracking every email, Za-zu will soon let you track opens for just a small, representative sample—perhaps 1 in every 20 emails. You get an accurate understanding of your real open rates without endangering your entire mailing list. Surprisingly, open tracking has always been binary—either fully on or completely off. It doesn’t need to be.

But maybe you should rethink open tracking altogether. Za-zu already provides more reliable indicators of deliverability. Since we manage both sending and receiving inboxes for our warming emails, we directly observe how many of those land directly in primary inboxes versus needing to be saved from spam. We measure this ratio over time to give us a sender reputation score.

Soon, we’ll expand this reputation system to automatically detect patterns like sudden drops in replies or unusual spikes in out-of-office responses. If one mailbox starts behaving differently from the others, we’ll catch it immediately—so you can address issues before they escalate.

Ultimately, if your goal is getting emails opened, don’t rely on tracking gimmicks. **Just write thoughtful, valuable emails, and deliver them to people who genuinely want to receive them. ** That’s always been—and always will be—the best strategy.