Hi @Entity -

A couple of common reasons for an email being opened repeatedly:

1. The mailbox provider is scanning the email and prefetching the images in the background, resulting in an open event to fire (e.g. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature)
2. There is a firewall or spam filter service being used which repeatedly scans emails in the inbox for potentially malicious content.

One way to verify if the open is a machine open is to expand the event details and see if the value for the “Machine Open” event property is “true”. See example screenshot below:
 

Hope the above helps add some insight to this!

Cheers,
Bobby
 

@Bobby  Thanks for the reply Bobby

Just checking through these emails and all state Machine Open: False.

Is there any other reason why this may occur? 

@Entity the only other reason that I could think of that I’ve seen before in this case is if the user opens the email and then, for example, leaves it open in the background in a tab in their browser window for an extended period of time. Each time the browser refreshes or loads, it can result in a “non-machine” open.

That’s the only other case I could think of where the Machine Open property would be labeled as “false”. Would be curious to see if anyone else in the community can think of another potential reason, though!

Hi @Entity,

Just wanted you to know you are not alone - I had a similar question about a month ago, see link below. In my case I *think* it was caused by the email provider pre-fetching the images. I just checked, and all of my “opens” showed Machine Open as false, too. Unfortunately, this leads me to question the validity of open rates. :-(