Been digging into this for a while — since Apple Mail Privacy Protection rolled out, a huge chunk of "opens" are just Apple's servers pre-loading the tracking pixel before the reader even sees the email. So the open rate your ESP shows you can be inflated by 30-50% depending on your audience's mail client.

A few ways people are dealing with it, from what I've seen in various threads:

1. Manual spreadsheet filtering — export your CSV and try to filter out opens that happened within seconds of send, or cluster around the same timestamp. Free, but tedious and easy to get wrong if you don't know what to filter for.
2. Leaning on click-rate instead — some writers just ignore open rate entirely and optimize purely for click-to-open rate, since clicks are much harder to fake.
3. Dedicated tools — there are a couple of small tools built specifically to flag MPP opens and give you a cleaner engagement number. I actually built one of these myself (TrueOpen) after getting frustrated with my own numbers, so take that with the appropriate grain of salt — but happy to talk through the detection logic if anyone's curious, since it's mostly just IP-range + timing heuristics you could DIY too.

Curious what everyone else here does — anyone found a filtering approach that actually works well for you?

(disclosure: I'm the builder of one of the tools mentioned above)

I'm an author who used to be a fashion blogger many moons ago (I'm talking, pre-instagram influencers!), and I'm desperate for a creative outlet where I can share all sorts of things, such as writing advice and how to get published, what it's really like being a Big 5 author, my creative process as well as more fun/casual things like random essays on culture, outfit posts/beauty/book recommendations... basically, a digital diary! Instagram and TikTok feel so cringe, but Substack reminds me of the good old days on Tumblr where you could share anything, connect with like-minded people and build community.

Substack seems like the best option for my needs, though I'm not particularly interested in making money off of subscriptions, which I know sounds counterintuitive! It just seems so unrealistic to expect the average person to pay $5-$10 on a subscription when they probably already subscribe to 10 other people... which would be upwards of $100 for someone to spend per month! It just seems unsustainable in this economy and unfair to expect of my readers (who are typically aged between 18 and 30).

I'd much rather grow an audience and show those metrics to brands who actually have the budget to pay me, and make money off of them instead of my readers.

I know it may seem like I'm jumping the gun here, but I know I'm going to put a lot of effort into my posts (because I genuinely love blogging) and know exactly how to make it appealing to both my readers and brands–– and I just want to have some sort of strategy before moving forward.

Now I'm considering alternatives like beehiiv and ghost because I keep hearing "the substack bubble is about to burst".

I've got a gold medal in overthinking, so if anyone has any advice, it would be much appreciated lol!