Bots and scanners are filtered out.
Apple's privacy proxy, corporate scanners, and Gmail prefetches get labeled as machines — never counted as reads.
Lots of machines open your email before a human does: Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-loads images for its users, corporate gateways like Mimecast and Proofpoint scan attachments and links, and Gmail itself prefetches images at delivery. Most trackers count every one of those as an 'open' — which is how you end up with emails 'read' 30 seconds after sending at 3am.
MailViewed classifies every single pixel load. Scanner loads are labeled: each one appears in the email's timeline as a Scanner open with the reason, and the top of the email's page counts them as filtered (bots and scanners, not counted). Like every machine fetch, they never turn a tick green, never fire a notification, and never count in your open rate. This filtering is always on for every account, on every plan; there is no setting to turn it off.
What counts as a real open
- A load through Gmail's image proxy when a person displays your email in Gmail.
- A direct image load from a real mail client (Outlook, Zoho, Apple Mail with Mail Privacy Protection turned off, and so on).
- A click on a tracked link — the strongest proof someone is reading.
One machine deserves its own mention: the Gmail app on phones. The moment your email's push notification reaches your recipient's phone, the app pre-downloads the message and its images so it opens instantly when tapped — a pixel load with nobody reading. MailViewed holds a first open that arrives within the first couple of minutes after delivery and counts it only if something a machine can't fake confirms it: a link click, a reply — or, if your recipient also uses MailViewed, their own extension confirming the open the instant their Gmail displays it. A normal open later doesn't confirm the held one: it counts on its own, at its own time, exactly as usual.
Your first two sends are the exception. A new account's first tracked emails are almost always tests, opened within seconds — so for those two, an open counts the moment it happens (the timeline row says so). From the third send on, the full protection above applies to every email.
This honesty is measurable: open your email's detail page and the timeline shows the human opens and the filtered scanner loads, side by side, with reasons. Ambiguous loads (a Gmail refetch that might or might not be a re-open) are stricter still: recorded internally, shown only once something confirms a human was reading.