Email Campaigns - Wrong Open rates - DNS records

Hi there,

This issue is related to Squarespace Email Campaigns.

Everything was working fine for me until a couple of days ago when I verified my third party domain by adding this DNS record -> "CNAME      squarespace._domainkey      squarespace-domainkey.squarespace-mail.com"

By doing this I intended to hide "a1e0.squarespace-mail.com" on the top of my Email Campaigns to only show the name of my business. It worked fine. Now when I send my emails the Squarespace mark has been gone.

The issue is that after doing this open rates suddenly got inflated. They are not accurate as they used to be.

Any email delivered to gmail accounts is shown as Open in Squarespace Email Campaign Statistics regardless if it was opened or not.

Can anyone help me with this?

Just in case I have attached a screenshot with a list of my domain DNS records.

Thanks so much!

1 hour ago, ramonn said:

Any email delivered to gmail accounts is shown as Open in Squarespace Email Campaign Statistics regardless if it was opened or not.

Have you contacted Squarespace Customer Care? When a Squarespace feature isn't working as expected I always recommend that as a first course of action. You can reach out to Customer Care using this link.

Hi Paul!

Thanks for your answer.

Yes, I contacted them but they did not give me any solution.

I was told they would check it but that I should not expect to see it fixed in an immediate future.

The point is that this started to happen just after adding that DNS record.

It could be a coincidence, but after many months working well, it is very rare that this issue happens just when I make the DNS change.

Do you have any idea about why this could happen?

Thanks again!

40 minutes ago, ramonn said:

The point is that this started to happen just after adding that DNS record. It could be a coincidence

I have no evidence, but anecdotally I think it is a coincidence.

I say this because everyone is seeing their "open" rates jump because of the introduction of mail privacy tools like Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) in iOS 15.

Where this is enabled, Apple route each email through their own proxy servers first to pre-load email content – including the tracking image – before serving the email to the user. This means that it will appear to have been opened, even though it hasn't been read by the true recipient. Although this has only been with us a short time, estimates suggest that Apple proxies account for around 75% of "opens".

I hope this helps. 🙂

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Thanks again, Paul.

In this case, I think Apple tool does not apply since most of my subscribers use Android.

Besides, this Apple feature was introduced last year and I have only noticed the issue just two days ago.

I guess it is something else...

Anyway, thanks for your collaboration!