---
title: "Email tracking: opens and clicks"
description: How Hive Mail counts opens and clicks in your emails, the three levels (per contact, anonymous, off), Apple Mail privacy opens and who is ignored.
url: "https://hiveplugins.com/docs/hive-mail-email-tracking-opens-and-clicks/"
updated: "2026-10-28"
category: Hive Mail
---

# Email tracking: opens and clicks

Hive Mail counts opens and clicks in the marketing emails you send. It is **on by default**, per contact, and separate from [visitor tracking](/docs/hive-mail-what-marketing-intelligence-records/). Only marketing emails (campaigns and marketing flow emails) are tracked; confirmation emails, admin alerts, receipts, previews and test sends never are.

## How it works

- **Opens:** a tiny transparent 1 by 1 picture is added to the HTML email; when a mail app loads it from your site, an open is counted. A Plain text email has no opens.
- **Clicks:** every ordinary web link (http or https) becomes a tracked address on your site, which records the click and redirects to the real page. A link never breaks: with a bad code, tracking off or a database problem the click still lands on its page, or on your home page.
- **Never tracked:** mailto, tel and anchor links, Hive Mail's own unsubscribe, preferences and view-in-browser pages, links to your public Hive Mail pages, and links marked `data-hm-notrack`.

## Choose a level

In **Settings > Tracking & Privacy**, card **Email tracking**, then **Save changes**. It applies to emails rendered from then on.

| Field | Choices | Default |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Open tracking** | **Track opens per contact**, **Anonymous (counts only, no contact or IP)**, **Off** | Track opens per contact |
| **Click tracking** | **Track clicks per contact**, **Anonymous (counts only)**, **Off** | Track clicks per contact |

![The Email tracking card with its two drop-downs](https://hiveplugins.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/hivemail-settings-email-tracking-card-21.webp)

- **Per contact** stores who opened or clicked (shown on the timeline and in campaign reports).
- **Anonymous** keeps counts per campaign and link only; no contact is stored and nobody earns engagement points.
- **Off:** new emails get no picture and no tracked links.

No IP address is ever stored. For a click, only the destination host goes on the timeline. To link a visitor to a contact after an email click, keep click tracking per contact and visitor tracking on Full.

## Who is counted

Only people. Hive Mail ignores link scanners, crawlers and preview tools (a browser identity containing words such as bot, crawl, spider, preview, scan, monitor, fetch, curl or headless), requests with no browser identity, HEAD requests, and clicks less than 3 seconds after sending (treated as a security scanner).

Apple Mail's privacy protection loads every image for everyone. Hive Mail records those as machine opens, kept out of the counters and the engagement score; the campaign report shows an "Apple Mail" figure ([campaign report](/docs/hive-mail-read-a-campaign-report/)). Treat opens as a guide and clicks as the more reliable sign of interest. With per-contact levels an open adds 1 point and a click 3 to the [engagement score](/docs/hive-mail-visitors-journeys-and-engagement-score/).

> **Warning:** Per-contact tracking records personal behaviour. Say in your privacy policy what you track and, where the law asks, make sure you may.

A click that goes to the home page means its code could not be read, for example after the salts in `wp-config.php` changed ([Conflicts with other plugins and caching](/docs/hive-mail-conflicts-with-plugins-and-caching/)).

Next: [How to read a campaign report](/docs/hive-mail-read-a-campaign-report/), [Consent and the law](/docs/hive-mail-consent-and-the-law-guide/).

This is information, not legal advice.