Email analytics

Track opens and clicks on marketing emails with signed, provider-agnostic hooks and read per-template rates on the admin Emails page.

Email analytics measures how your marketing emails perform. Every founder-style send is tagged, its opens and clicks are recorded by your own backend, and the numbers roll up into an admin Emails page at /admin/emails. It is on by default and works with any provider - no vendor dashboard, no external setup.

What gets tracked

Only the five founder-style marketing templates carry tracking:

Template	Purpose
`welcome`	Post-signup founder hello
`announcement`	Product announcement
`getting-started-check-in`	Onboarding nudge
`feedback-request`	Ask for feedback
`we-miss-you`	Re-engagement

Transactional emails are never tracked. Password resets, verifications, magic links, and invitations carry no pixel and no rewritten links, so they never appear in analytics.

How it works

Each tracked send gets two signed hooks, both served by your own backend - so analytics behaves identically on SMTP, SES, and Resend with zero provider configuration.

Hook	Mechanism
Open	A 1x1 pixel with a signed token. The backend verifies the signature and records an open.
Click	Every link is rewritten to a signed redirect. The backend verifies the token, records a click, then 302s to the real destination.
Prefetch window	Hits arriving within 10 seconds of dispatch are ignored. The pixel still returns and links still redirect, but no event is recorded.
Noise limits	Known bot user-agents are filtered out, and each send records at most 50 events.

Signing means counts cannot be forged by replaying a URL. The prefetch window exists because mailbox providers fetch images and security gateways follow links as the message lands - without it every send would score a 100% open rate instantly.

Metrics

The same counts drive every card and chart. Rates fall back to 0 when the denominator is 0.

Metric	Definition
Sent	Emails sent for that template in the selected period.
Views	Total opens, repeat opens included. A count, never a share of sent.
Open rate	Unique opens / sent. Each recipient counts once, so it never exceeds 100%.
Click rate	Unique clicks / sent. Each recipient counts once.
CTOR	Click-to-open rate: unique clicks / unique opens.

Opens are approximate; clicks are not. Mail privacy proxies (Apple Mail Privacy Protection, Gmail's image cache) can load the pixel minutes later with no human involved, inflating views and open rate past the prefetch window. Treat click rate as the trustworthy metric when comparing subject lines or copy.

The admin Emails page

/admin/emails has two parts:

Per-template cards - sent, views, open rate, click rate, and CTOR for the range, one card per tracked template.
Rate chart - open rate and click rate plotted over time, with 7 / 30 / 90 day tabs and a per-template filter.

The page loads the last 90 days once and re-slices it in the browser, so switching views is instant.

Configuration

Analytics is governed by config.email.tracking in packages/config/src/index.ts:

email: {
  // ...
  tracking: {
    enabled: true,      // default - master switch
    retentionDays: 90   // default - days of event history to keep
  }
}

Key	Effect
`enabled`	Turns the feature on or off.
`retentionDays`	Caps event history; a daily cleanup job deletes anything older.

enabled: false hides the admin Emails page and its nav tab and stops recording. Links in already-sent emails keep redirecting so readers are never stranded - they simply are not counted.

Privacy

No personal identifiers stored. Events record which send was opened or clicked and when - never the reader's IP address or user agent.
Cascade deletion. A user's email events are deleted with the user.
Retention cleanup. The daily job prunes events past retentionDays, keeping the table bounded.

Rotating BETTER_AUTH_SECRET invalidates tracking URLs in already-delivered emails: opens stop counting and tracked links stop redirecting, since the destination is signature-verified like other signed links.

Email

The templates, senders, and providers behind every tracked send.

Background jobs

The daily cleanup job that enforces retentionDays.