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.