The ESP That Deleted Its Own Honest Open Rates w/ Travis Hazlewood

Every email platform can identify machine-generated opens. Almost none of them show you. Travis Hazlewood is Head of Email Deliverability at Ortto, now a Canva company. He's in his eighth year in deliverability, running global platform delivery audits, blocklist remediation, and sender reputation repair for high-volume senders. He sees the data your dashboard doesn't show you. He told me a story I hadn't heard before: Ortto built filtering to strip machine opens out of reporting, shipped it, and had to pull it when customers complained their numbers looked worse than on competing platforms. Honest reporting lost the bake-off. We get into why Microsoft is deliberately camouflaging its scanner clicks, what Proofpoint admits it does to previously delivered mail, why Travis calls send time optimization a crutch, and the term he coined for the damage marketers cause without meaning to: Secondhand Spam.We also disagreed on air about whether the machine-open metric belongs in a dashboard at all. He'd delete it. I gate on it. Both positions are in the episode. Plus: APRF, the proposed standard that could finally tell you where your mail actually landed. Subscribe for weekly conversations on newsletter growth, deliverability, and monetization: https://www.youtube.com/@audiencebridge Get the newsletter breakdown of every episode: https://www.audiencebridge.io/subscribe CONNECT WITH TRAVIS: Ortto: https://ortto.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-hazlewood/CONNECT WITH CHRIS: X: https://x.com/miqchris LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismiquel Audience Bridge: https://www.audiencebridge.io