Why we retired individual email Open Tracking (and what replaces it)?

If you've used Resquared for a while, you're used to seeing the Email Activity column: a number showing how many times a specific email was opened. That column has been replaced by a new one, Last Activity, which shows the most recent thing that happened with a business (an email was sent, the business replied, you replied back, and so on).

Here's the reasoning behind the change, and why it's a net win for your outreach.

Open tracking was already becoming unreliable

Every outreach email that includes open tracking relies on a tiny, invisible tracking pixel: a 1x1 image embedded in the email that "fires" when it loads, letting the sender know the email was opened.

The problem is that inbox providers have spent the last few years building privacy features that interfere with exactly this mechanism. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, for example, automatically pre-loads every image in an email the moment it arrives, whether or not the recipient ever reads it. Gmail and Yahoo route images through their own proxy servers rather than the recipient's device. In practice, this means an "open" no longer reliably tells you that a person opened your email. It can just as easily mean a privacy feature loaded it in the background, or a corporate security scanner checked it for malware before it ever reached an inbox.

So the open count sitting in your dashboard was already telling you less than it appeared to. Losing it isn't losing the signal it was supposed to represent; it's losing a number that had quietly stopped meaning what it used to.

Tracking pixels are also a deliverability liability

There's a second, more direct reason we made this change: inbox providers don't just distort tracking pixels, they actively use them as a signal to identify campaign email. A tracking pixel is one more marker that separates a "real," one-to-one email from a mass send, and spam filters have gotten increasingly good at spotting it. The more markers an email carries, the more likely it is to be filtered before a human ever sees it, regardless of how well-written the message is.

Removing individual open tracking closes off that signal entirely. It's the same logic behind the other work we do quietly in the background, like rotating sending domains, warming them up properly, and keeping lists clean, all aimed at making sure your emails read as genuine outreach and land in the inbox rather than the spam folder.

What we're adding

In place of an open count, the Last Activity column gives you a straightforward view of where each business actually stands: whether an email went out, whether they responded, or whether you're the one who owes a reply. It's a smaller number of states, but each one reflects something that actually happened, rather than a pixel load that may or may not correspond to a real person reading your email.

For most outreach workflows, this is the information that matters more anyway. Knowing that a business replied tells you far more than knowing an email was opened three times.

Our commitment to deliverability doesn't change

This update is part of the ongoing, mostly invisible work we do to protect deliverability as inbox providers keep evolving their filters. It won't be the last adjustment we make, and not every change will be obvious from the outside. But the goal stays the same: making sure your emails consistently reach real people, not spam folders.

Questions about this change? Reach out to us anytime at human@re2.ai.