What Percentage of B2B Email Opens Are Actually Fake

Open rate no longer means what most teams think it means. Litmus data shows Apple's Mail Privacy Protection now affects roughly 55% to 60% of all email opens, and Apple as a whole, across Mail, iPhone, iPad, and MPP combined, accounts for close to 65% of every open tracked. MPP works by pre-loading a message on Apple's own servers the moment it arrives, which fires your open-tracking pixel automatically, whether or not a person ever looks at the email.

TL;DR

• Apple's Mail Privacy Protection now affects roughly 55–60% of all email opens, meaning a majority of the "opens" many B2B senders report are not confirmed human opens.

• Apple accounts for close to 65% of all tracked email opens overall, once Mail, iPhone, iPad, and MPP are combined. Litmus

• MPP is enabled by default, so most Apple Mail users never turn it on or off themselves. It is simply part of how their inbox behaves.

• Emarketnow's approach avoids this blind spot from the start. Because every contact is human-verified before delivery, you are reaching a real decision-maker instead of relying on an open-rate metric that can no longer confirm anyone actually read the message.

How Apple Mail Privacy Protection Creates a Fake Open

Open tracking has always worked the same way. A tiny, invisible image is embedded in the email, and when a recipient's mail client loads that image, your platform logs an open. MPP breaks the assumption behind that entire system. Instead of waiting for the recipient, Apple's servers pre-fetch the email content, including the tracking pixel, within minutes of delivery so it can scan the message for privacy and security reasons before it ever reaches the inbox. Your tracking platform sees the pixel load and records an open exactly as it would for a real person, even if the recipient never scrolls past their inbox list.

Why This Matters More for B2B Than It Looks

B2B senders often assume this is mostly a consumer marketing problem, but Apple's device share in professional email is high enough that it shows up in almost every cold outbound campaign. Because MPP is on by default, a rep cannot simply filter it out by asking better questions about their list. Two consequences follow directly from this:

• Open-based segmentation breaks down. Any workflow that tags a prospect as "engaged" after one or two opens is now tagging a large share of people who never actually saw the email, since MPP opens behave identically to real ones in most tracking dashboards.

• A/B tests on subject lines get noisier. If a meaningful share of a test group is on Apple Mail, the automatic opens dilute the difference between a strong subject line and a weak one, making results harder to trust without filtering Apple traffic out first.

What to Track Instead of Raw Open Rate

Open rate is not useless, but it now works best as a rough delivery signal rather than an engagement signal. Better indicators include:

• Reply rate. A reply requires a person to read the message and act on it, something no automated proxy can fake.

• Click rate on distinct links. Clicks still require a deliberate action, though it is worth noting that clicks can be inflated for a different reason entirely. See our article on why your cold email clicks might be fake for how enterprise security scanners create a similar problem on the click side.

• Meetings booked per send. This is the metric furthest removed from any tracking artifact, since it requires a real conversation to occur.

• Bounce and complaint rate. These remain reliable regardless of MPP, and they are still the clearest signs of list quality. Our article on the average B2B cold email bounce rate covers what a healthy baseline looks like.

How to Reduce the Noise in Your Reporting

1. Segment opens by device or client where your platform allows it. Isolating Apple Mail opens lets you see your non-Apple open rate separately, which is a much more honest engagement number.

2. Stop triggering follow-ups on open events alone. Build sequence logic around replies, clicks, or meetings instead, so an automatic MPP open does not push a prospect into messaging that assumes they read something they never saw.

3. Report a blended engagement score instead of open rate alone. Combine reply rate, click rate, and meeting rate into one number for campaign reviews so no single inflated metric skews the read on performance.

4. Set expectations with stakeholders early. If leadership is used to watching open rate as the primary KPI, explain the MPP effect before a quarter-over-quarter comparison looks artificially strong or weak.

How Emarketnow Approaches This Differently

Because open rate can no longer confirm a real person saw your message, the more reliable lever is making sure the message reaches a real, current decision-maker in the first place. Emarketnow verifies every contact by hand before delivery, which means your reply and meeting rates reflect actual interest rather than a mix of real engagement and automated proxy traffic. Learn more in our article on human-verified leads.

FAQ

Does turning off open tracking fix the problem?

Not really. Turning off tracking just removes your visibility into the issue rather than solving it. The better fix is to stop treating open rate as your primary engagement metric and lean on replies, clicks, and meetings instead.

Is this only a problem for Apple Mail users?

Mostly, yes, since MPP is specific to Apple's Mail app and is enabled by default for the large majority of its users. Other major clients do not currently pre-fetch messages in the same way, though tracking reliability varies across every client to some degree.

How can I estimate my real open rate if a majority of opens are unreliable?

If your platform lets you segment by client, compare your non-Apple open rate against your blended rate to see the gap directly. If it does not, treat your reported open rate as a rough delivery signal and weight reply rate and meetings booked far more heavily when judging whether a campaign actually worked.