What’s the risk of overinterpreting open data (MPP distortion)?

Apple **Mail Privacy Protection** and similar features inflate open rates by pre-fetching images regardless of actual human opens. Treating this distorted data as accurate leads to wrong conclusions about engagement and content performance.

Specific risks: believing engagement is higher than reality, missing declining engagement trends hidden by inflated rates, making content decisions based on false positive signals, and miscalculating **sender reputation** from apparent engagement.

Mitigation: focus on click rates (less affected by privacy features), segment analysis by client/device (isolate **MPP** traffic), use relative comparisons rather than absolute rates, and track downstream conversions that reflect genuine engagement regardless of open measurement.