Open and click reports that leave the bots out

Who it is for

• Indie founders who want to know whether an update was read without guessing from inflated numbers.
• Creators running a newsletter who track which links readers click and whether this week beat last week.
• SaaS teams sending product updates whose readers sit behind corporate security filters that click every link in an email.
• Agencies who report results to clients and need numbers they can defend.

What is filtered out

Each open and click is classified when it arrives. Machine activity is stored, shown as a separate count, and left out of every rate. SendHQ treats these as machine activity:

• Apple Mail Privacy Protection, which loads every image in a message whether or not anyone reads it.
• Security scanners and link checkers, such as Proofpoint, Mimecast, Barracuda and Microsoft Safe Links, identified by their user agents.
• Requests from hosting and datacenter networks, where people rarely click. Gmail's image proxy is allowed for opens because it fetches images for real readers.
• Clicks within 5 seconds of the email being sent, which is faster than a person opens and reads.
• Requests with no user agent, and HEAD requests.

Tracked links are signed, and SendHQ checks the signature before it records anything or redirects, so a tracked link cannot be turned into an open redirect. You can switch open or click tracking off for any issue.

What each report shows

• Rates: delivered, opened, clicked, click-to-open, bounced, complained and unsubscribed, with delivery, open, click, bounce and unsubscribe rates compared with your average over the previous five issues.
• Timeline: first opens and clicks hour by hour from the start of sending.
• Links: unique and total clicks per link, and each link's share of all clicks.
• Inbox providers: sent, delivered, opens and clicks for Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, Proton and other addresses.
• Recipients: who opened, clicked, did not open, was not delivered, bounced, complained or unsubscribed, with the links each person clicked.

The overview across issues

The campaigns overview charts subscribers over the last 30 days with how many joined and left, counts active, pending and dormant readers, and lists your recent issues with their open and click rates.

Why opens are an estimate

An open is an image load. Readers who block images never register one, and Apple Mail loads images for readers who never look. Filtering removes the obvious machine loads, which means Apple Mail readers who do read are mostly not counted as opens either. Clicks are a firmer signal: SendHQ counts a click as an open too, because the reader must have opened the email to click. Use opens to compare one issue with another, and clicks to judge what readers acted on.

From the API and your AI agent

Ask an agent which link did best in last week's issue, or who clicked it. The same features are in the REST API under /api/v1, the sendhq CLI, and the MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor can do this work for you through the hosted connector at https://mcp.sendhq.cc/mcp. See the campaigns API reference.

# The full report for one issue
curl https://sendhq.cc/api/v1/broadcasts/brd_123/report -H "Authorization: Bearer $SENDHQ_API_KEY"

# Everyone who clicked, with the links they clicked
curl "https://sendhq.cc/api/v1/broadcasts/brd_123/recipients?activity=clicked" -H "Authorization: Bearer $SENDHQ_API_KEY"

# Subscriber growth and recent issues
curl https://sendhq.cc/api/v1/campaigns/overview -H "Authorization: Bearer $SENDHQ_API_KEY"

Honest limits

• Open rates undercount Apple Mail readers and anyone who blocks images. They are a relative measure, not a count of people who read.
• Inbox providers are grouped by the recipient's address. A company using Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 on its own domain shows under Other.
• Tracking applies to newsletter broadcasts only. Transactional email sent through the API is not tracked.
• Delivered comes from the receiving server's confirmation. It does not prove the email reached the inbox rather than spam.

Questions