Rubber fish (and what email metrics forgot)

For a long time, many of us have treated mass emailing like net fishing.

Cast the net. Pull it back in. Count what you caught.
Open rate. Click-through rate. Bigger haul = better job.

Those numbers were never perfect, but they were comforting.
They made the work feel concrete. You could see something happen.

That illusion is mostly gone now.

Not because your tools broke. Not because you did something wrong.
But because inbox providers decided -- deliberately -- that they didn’t want to reveal so much about the recpient’s actions anymore.

So the nets came back empty.
Or worse, full of rubber fish.

What’s interesting is what this reveals.

The fishing analogy was never right for email in the first place.
It just looked that way because our tools encouraged us to think in terms of volume, extraction, and immediate yield.

Truth is, email has always been closer to gardening.

You don’t send one message and get a result.
You prepare the soil.
You plant consistently.
You notice who keeps coming back.
You watch what grows over time.

Gardening feels slower. Less decisive. Harder to dashboard. That’s why many of us preferred the fishing story. It let us believe the job was “send more emails” -- when actually it was, and is, “cultivate belonging.”

The death of open and click rates doesn’t take something essential away from you. It removes a distraction.

Email’s real job was never to generate percentages. It was to maintain connection at scale. To remind people they belong here. To invite them into something ongoing.

So if you're mourning the loss of your click-through report's usefulness, I encourage you to try this practical reframe:

Stop asking, after every send, “How did this email perform?”
Start asking, once a week, “Who showed up again?”

Who replied.
Who registered.
Who donated twice.
Who came back after going quiet.
Who forwarded it to a colleague and said, “You should see this.”

Those are gardening signals. They’re quieter. But they’re real.

Fishing is seductive because it promises fast feedback.
Gardening is steadier because it works with how humans actually behave.

Email is still doing its job.
With the loss of useful open-rates and CTR, we’re just finally being nudged to notice what the job always was.

All the best,
A.