Can I see who opened my email?

That sentence is the whole feature. It is worth reading twice, because it is the reason your numbers will look different from the ones another email tool would show you.

What has to be true before anything is recorded

Four things, and all of them at once:

1. Recording is switched on across bernard.
2. Bernard has switched your site on for it.
3. Your site’s own setting is on, which it is unless somebody turned it off.
4. An owner of your account has accepted the addition to the Terms.

If any one of those is missing, nothing is recorded for anybody, and Bernard will tell you which one it is - one reason, the first that failed, so you always have exactly one thing to look at.

Two of those four are ours and two are yours. Accepting the addition to the Terms is the one that is genuinely up to you; the rest is bernard rolling the feature out site by site.

Then, on top of all four, each individual reader still needs to have agreed. A person who has not agreed is sent the plain message with its original links, and no record of them is kept. How do people agree to opens and clicks being recorded? covers how somebody agrees and how they stop.

Switching it off, and back on

You do not have to switch anything on. Your site’s own setting starts on, so once an owner has accepted the addition to the Terms and bernard has switched your site on, recording begins for the readers who have agreed and for nobody else.

You can stop it whenever you like. Ask Bernard, in the Workshop or in Community:

Turn opens and clicks off for my emails.

Bernard reads the real state first, quotes the site and the current setting back to you, and waits for you to say yes. It changes nothing until you do, and it sends no email at any point.

Stopping never needs the Terms. An owner can switch recording off at any moment, whatever her account has or has not accepted, because stopping is always allowed.

Turning it back on is the direction that needs an owner to have accepted the addition to the Terms. If nobody has, Bernard refuses and names the version and the page where an owner accepts it. That refusal is the answer, not a hurdle to work around: the Terms are what makes the recording lawful in the first place.

Either way the change is an account owner’s to make. Bernard will not do it on the word of anybody else.

If you would rather not record opens and clicks at all, switching it off is the whole answer. Nothing else about your campaigns changes.

What you see afterwards

Under a sent campaign, one sentence:

218 of 312 people had agreed to be counted. 118 opened, 41 clicked, and another 64 were fetched by a mail app and may not have been read.

The count of people who agreed comes first on purpose. It stops the second number being read as a rate over your whole list, which it is not. Underneath, a small table shows each link in the message, where it goes, and how many people pressed it. That table is counts only; it does not name anybody. See Who clicked the link in my email?.

If recording is on but nobody in that particular campaign had agreed, the page says so in a sentence rather than showing you a row of zeros, because zeros would read as “nobody opened it” and that is a claim about people bernard never watched. If recording is off for the site altogether, it says that instead. They are different facts and bernard keeps them apart.

Why some opens are set aside

Mail apps have got busy. Several of the big ones fetch the images in a message before the person has looked at it, and some security systems press every link in a message to check it is safe. Both look exactly like a keen reader.

Bernard flags those and holds them out of the headline count, then tells you how many there were in the same sentence. It never deletes them and never hides them. The error runs in the safe direction: an open bernard is unsure about is reported as uncertain, never as a person who read your email.

That is also why bernard will not turn “no record” into “did not open”. If somebody’s only opens were flagged, they are unknown, not absent.

How long it is kept

For up to a year. After that the individual records are removed and only the campaign totals remain, so a campaign from two years ago still has its numbers but no longer has a per-person trail.

Where it fits

What happened after I sent my email campaign? is the rest of a campaign’s results: delivered, addresses retired, unsubscribed, complaints and the plain reason anything did not arrive. Is my email sending healthy? covers the redirect address in your setup checklist. For the whole path from writing to sending, start at How do email campaigns work?.