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. Machine fetches are labeled — you'll see them in the email's timeline as filtered (bots/scanners) with the reason — and they never turn a tick green, never fire a notification, and never count in your open rate.
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, Apple Mail on desktop, Zoho, and so on).
- A click on a tracked link — the strongest proof someone is reading.
This honesty is measurable: open your email's detail page and the timeline shows both the human opens and the filtered machine loads, side by side, with reasons.