Why are opens and clicks not tracked?

This article helps when emails are delivered but never show Loaded or Clicked, or your analytics show zero opens and clicks.

Symptoms

• Emails stay Delivered even though recipients opened them or clicked links.
• The Loads and Clicks tabs on the email page are empty.
• No email.loaded or email.clicked webhook events arrive.
• The links in received emails point straight to your site instead of https://go.acme.com/….

Cause

Emailit only tracks mail sent from a domain with a verified tracking CNAME. Without it, every email is sent untracked, whatever your settings say. The usual causes:

• The tracking record is missing or wrong. It’s a CNAME from go.acme.com (or your custom tracking subdomain) to go.emailitmail.com.
• The record is proxied on Cloudflare. A proxied record doesn’t return a CNAME, so verification fails. See Why does my tracking CNAME fail on Cloudflare?.
• Tracking is turned off. Track loads and Track clicks are off by default for each domain.
• Your API request turns it off. The tracking parameter overrides the domain defaults for that email.
• The email has no HTML. Open tracking adds a tiny image to the HTML part, and click tracking rewrites http and https links in it. Plain-text emails can’t be tracked.
• The recipient’s mail app blocks images. Opens are recorded only when the image loads, so some opens are never counted.

Fix

1. Check the tracking record. Open Email API›Domains, select the domain and find the tracking CNAME in the DNS records. It must show OK.

2. Publish or fix the CNAME. Add it at your DNS provider, then select Check DNS:

   Text

   go.acme.com  CNAME  go.emailitmail.com

   If your DNS is on Cloudflare, set the record to DNS only. See Custom tracking domain.

3. Turn on tracking for the domain. Once the CNAME is OK, switch on Track loads and Track clicks on the domain page, or call Update a domain with track_loads and track_clicks. These defaults apply to API and SMTP mail.

4. Check your API requests. If you pass tracking, set it to true or to {"loads": true, "clicks": true}. Leave it out to use the domain defaults. SMTP mail always follows the domain defaults.

5. Send a new test email. Tracking is decided when the email is sent, so earlier emails stay untracked. Send an HTML email to yourself, open it with images on and click a link. The status changes to Loaded, then Clicked.

Campaign emails are tracked automatically once the tracking CNAME is verified. Emailit re-checks the record every day. If it breaks, new mail goes out untracked until it passes again. Learn more in Tracking.

Still stuck?

Contact support or ask in Discord with the domain name and the ID of an email that should have been tracked.