Stop segmenting on opens. The data was never real.

62.26% of email opens now come through Apple, and Mail Privacy Protection fakes 55-60% of them. Since April, the ICO and the CNIL have both treated firing that pixel as something needing active consent, not a default. Unreliable and increasingly ungranted: that's reason enough to stop. The fix isn't a smarter open-rate model. It's a wider set of signals a pixel can't fake: recency, frequency and monetary value from what someone actually bought, alongside the site visits, cart adds and app sessions that show you who's really paying attention. Tim Roe on ABLE-RFM+, the framework built on those signals, and why it's a stronger read on a subscriber than an open ever was.

Tim Roe Strategy Director

9/8/20265 min read

Litmus put Apple's share of all email opens at 62.26% in July 2026, and reckons Mail Privacy Protection is behind 55% to 60% of them. MPP fires the tracking pixel automatically, on Apple's own servers, whether or not a human ever looks at the email, and most engagement segmentation reads that fake open as interest. So the subscribers most likely ignoring you get mailed harder, not less. Deliverability and list health both take the hit. And since April, the ICO's storage and access technologies guidance and the CNIL's tracking-pixel recommendation have both treated firing that pixel as something needing active consent, not a default. Unreliable and increasingly ungranted: that's the case for dropping it.

The fix isn't a cleverer pixel. It's building segmentation on a wider spread of response data, most of which you already own, and none of which a privacy setting can generate for free.

Start with what's unarguable: recency, frequency and monetary value, drawn from the purchase history you already hold lawfully for fulfilment. Nobody can silently manufacture a purchase the way MPP manufactures an open. Then widen the lens to behaviour: a site visit, a product page view, a cart add, an SMS click, an app session. These are still response data, but they're first-party signals captured on your own property, not a pixel fired on Apple's mail servers under rules Apple controls. None of it raises the fresh-consent question a tracking pixel now does.

That's the logic behind ABLE-RFM+: Acquisition, how someone found you; Brand, the loyalty and affinity signals such as reviews, referrals and repeat visits; Loyalty, tenure and repeat purchase behaviour over time; and Engagement, that wider set of behavioural signals rather than a single pixel fire. Layer that onto RFM and read it through a strategy and personalisation layer, and a segment stops being one binary flag a mail client can manufacture. It becomes several things that all have to be true at once, which is a much harder thing to fake and a much better basis for deciding who gets mailed, what they get sent, and how often.

Take a subscriber who hasn't "opened" in three months by MPP's own broken measure. Under old segmentation, that's a dead contact: suppress them, or hit them with a generic win-back built on nothing. Under ABLE-RFM+, the same subscriber visited the site twice last week, added a product to their basket, and bought at a high average order value eighteen months ago. That's not a dead contact. That's a warm one who needs a nudge, not a discount blast, and open-based segmentation would never have told you the difference.

That's a stronger foundation for lifecycle logic than an open ever was, pixel or no pixel, ICO or no ICO. The decision for whoever owns CRM strategy isn't whether to patch the metric. It's whether to keep building on the one signal you can't verify and increasingly can't justify collecting, or move onto several you can, most of which you already hold.

Sources: Litmus, Email Client Market Share, July 2026; ICO, Final storage and access technologies guidance published, 29 April 2026; CNIL, Recommandation pixels de suivi dans les courriers électroniques, 12 March 2026; Légifrance, Délibération n° 2026-042 du 12 mars 2026

FAQs

What percentage of email opens are actually Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, not a real person opening the email?

Litmus reported Apple's share of all email opens at 62.26% in July 2026, and estimated that Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) affects 55% to 60% of those opens. MPP pre-fetches the tracking pixel automatically on Apple's own servers, so a large share of "opens" recorded by an ESP are not evidence a human ever saw the email.

Is the email open-tracking pixel a compliance risk as well as a data-accuracy problem?

Yes. A pixel fired under full consent is still fired automatically by MPP regardless of whether a human ever saw the email, so consent doesn't make the data reliable. Separately, the UK ICO and the French CNIL have both, within weeks of each other in 2026, published guidance treating the open-tracking pixel as something needing active consent or disclosure, not a default. Brands relying on it now have to solve for accuracy and compliance at the same time.

What is ABLE-RFM+, and what do the letters stand for?

ABLE-RFM+ is VALIX's segmentation framework, built to replace single-signal metrics like open rate with several signals that all have to be true at once. Acquisition covers how a customer found you; Brand covers loyalty and affinity signals such as reviews, referrals and repeat visits; Loyalty covers tenure and repeat purchase behaviour over time; and Engagement covers the wider behavioural response data described below, rather than a single pixel fire. RFM (recency, frequency, monetary value) sits underneath, drawn from actual purchase history, and a strategy and personalisation layer, the "plus", turns the resulting profile into a specific next action rather than a blanket send-more-or-send-less rule.

What counts as "wider response data" beyond email opens, and why does it matter?

It means first-party behavioural signals a brand captures on its own property: a site visit, a product page view, a cart add, an SMS click, an app session. None of these can be silently generated by a mail client the way MPP generates a fake open, and none of them raise the fresh-consent question a tracking pixel now does, because they're not collected through an email pixel at all. Read alongside purchase history, they let a brand tell the difference between a subscriber who's genuinely gone quiet and one who's still active on-site but simply not opening email on an Apple device.

What happens to send frequency when MPP-inflated opens are treated as engagement?

Subscribers whose "opens" are really MPP pre-fetches get classified as engaged, which typically means they're mailed more often, not less. In practice this means the subscribers most likely to be ignoring a brand's emails are the ones being sent the most mail, which degrades deliverability and list health over time. ABLE-RFM+ avoids this because no single signal decides the outcome.

When did UK and French regulators issue guidance on email tracking pixels, and what do they actually require?

The UK ICO finalised its guidance on storage and access technologies, covering tracking pixels alongside cookies and device fingerprinting, publishing the final version on 29 April 2026. The French CNIL adopted a recommendation specifically on tracking pixels in emails on 12 March 2026, in force from 14 April 2026, requiring consent for most tracking pixels and setting a 14 July 2026 deadline for telling existing subscribers what's being collected, followed by an FAQ on 22 July 2026. Both now treat firing the pixel as something that needs active consent or disclosure rather than a default.

Why is RFM segmentation, on its own, not the whole answer?

Recency, frequency and monetary value (how recently someone bought, how often, and how much they spent) come from purchase history a brand already holds lawfully for fulfilment, so they can't be faked the way an email open can. But RFM alone only sees people who've already bought. Layering it with acquisition, brand and loyalty signals, and with wider behavioural engagement data such as site visits and app activity, catches subscribers who are active and valuable but haven't converted recently, which RFM by itself would miss.

Does this mean brands should stop measuring email opens altogether?

Not necessarily, but open rate should be read as a rough trend indicator, such as a sudden drop that signals a deliverability problem, rather than as an individual-level signal that decides who gets segmented, targeted or mailed more. The specific decision this raises is whether lifecycle and personalisation logic should keep depending on a metric that can no longer be validated at the individual level, when a broader set of first-party signals is already available.

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