Why do some recipients of an email appear to have opened multiple times?

DESCRIPTION

Multiple opens alone is no indication of anything more than a recipient coming back to open your email more than once.  However, there are cases where recipient opens seem much higher than expected, or opens are registered within seconds/minutes of each other for the same recipient.  The cause can be attributed to a few scenarios:

1. Many email clients like (Outlook or Apple Mail) have a preview pane as part of the inbox view.  If a recipient scrolls over your email in their inbox (even passively), this can trigger an email open notification back to our software.  Industry wide opens are tracked by images.  When the image is displayed, the email is considered opened.  This is controlled by the email client and is not distinguishable from normal opens. 

2. Direct forwards could also be the culprit, depending on how the Forward was initiated.  If the recipient of your email uses the Forward feature in their email client, the open of the person receiving the forwarded email is tracked back to your original recipient.  When using the Forward feature in the email client, it's sending an exact copy of the original email.  

3. There are also instances of virus scanners that preview emails to determine spam.  In this case, we do not have a way to distinguish between machine clicks and human clicks.

If you ever have questions surrounding your open rates, contact our Support team.