🚨 Attention to my fellow email marketers, especially the ones marketing to Europe.
France just made your open rate illegal. Italy is next.
Not the tracking email itself. The tracking pixel inside it.
On April 14, 2026, France's data authority (CNIL) ruled that email tracking pixels are treated like cookies. The pixel needs its own consent, separate from the consent to send the email. Italy passed a binding version three days later.
France's deadline is July 14. That is 11 days away. ⏰
Italy's lands on October 28.
What actually changed:
You can still send a cold email to a business contact in France or Italy.
What you cannot do is silently track whether they opened it.
The email is legal.
The pixel is not, unless you have explicit consent.
One thing most marketers will get wrong:
Sending a bulk re-permission email in July, counting the opens, and assuming silence means yes.
That fails twice. Silence is not consent. And the re-permission email itself fires a pixel before the recipient can respond. Consent must come before the first email, not inside it.
What to do instead:
→ Turn off open tracking for French and Italian contacts who have not explicitly consented to it.
→ Replace open-based triggers in your automation with click-based triggers.
→ Collect tracking consent at the sign-up form level, before any email is sent.
→ Shift your reporting to clicks, replies, demo requests, and form fills.
The truth underneath this is simpler.
Open rate has been a broken metric for years.
Apple killed its reliability in 2021.
This ruling finishes the job in two European markets, and the rest of the EU is likely to follow.
The email can still be sent. The tracking cannot.
If you email France or Italy, open rate is now a consent-gated metric. Start measuring what buyers actually do, not whether their email client loaded an image.