# What is a good cold email open rate?
> People still quote 40 to 60 percent as healthy. Treat opens as a spam alarm, not a success metric. Privacy features inflate the number.
- HTML: https://omentir.com/help/what-is-a-good-cold-email-open-rate
- Markdown: https://omentir.com/help/what-is-a-good-cold-email-open-rate.md

Open rate used to mean they saw the subject and loaded images. Apple Mail Privacy Protection and similar features prefetch pixels, so opens can look great while humans ignore you.

If opens collapse under ~30 percent on a warmed domain, check spam folders with seeds. That is still a useful alarm. If opens are 80 percent and replies are 0, believe replies.

Do not A/B test subjects on opens alone in 2026. Use replies, or you will pick the subject that robots prefetch.

A high open rate on a tiny internal test is not a benchmark. Compare campaigns with similar list quality.

LinkedIn does not give a clean open on DMs. Do not mix the two charts. See [reply rate](/help/what-is-a-good-cold-email-reply-rate).

## Related

- [What is a good cold email reply rate?](https://omentir.com/help/what-is-a-good-cold-email-reply-rate.md)
- [What is a good cold email subject line?](https://omentir.com/help/what-is-a-good-cold-email-subject-line.md)
- [Why are my cold emails going to spam?](https://omentir.com/help/why-are-my-cold-emails-going-to-spam.md)

## Frequently asked questions

**Should I turn off open tracking?**

Many teams do, to look less like a campaign and to stop worshipping a fake number. Watch replies and meetings.

**Does a preview pane count as an open?**

Sometimes, depending on the client and the pixel. Another reason not to trust the metric.

**Can I still use opens to time a follow-up?**

Risky. You may follow up on a privacy bot. Time follow-ups on a calendar, not on a pixel.

**What if opens are high in Gmail and low in Outlook?**

Placement and prefetch differ by host. Check seeds in both. Do not rewrite copy for a pixel gap until placement is confirmed.

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