Apple Mail Privacy Protection

The email marketing community has been abuzz since Apple announced its Mail Privacy Protection feature on 7 June. The feature is expected to launch this year (2021), sometime between September and November.

“Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. It prevents senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can't be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.” — Apple

What to expect

When an Apple Mail user first opens the app, they'll be prompted to choose between “Protect Mail activity” and “Don't protect Mail activity”.

If the user chooses to protect their activity, Apple begins routing their emails through a proxy server to pre‑load all remotely hosted content. So an email and its content will be privately downloaded by Apple, even if the recipient never opens it.

When a recipient opens an email sent via eNudge and downloads the remotely hosted images, that's when eNudge marks the email as “opened” by that contact. When Apple downloads all content privately — regardless of whether the email was opened — it will appear as if all your Apple Mail contacts have opened your email.

As a result, we expect your open rate to increase, potentially containing some false positives. This only affects recipients who read email using Apple Mail. We similarly expect URL click‑through rates to be overstated, as Apple replaces tracking links (by following them) with untracked links directly to the destination URL.

Who it affects

The extent of the impact on your results depends on how many of your subscribers use Apple Mail — it will likely inflate your open and click‑through rates. Your recipients use a mix of clients (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo! Mail and so on), and some people on Apple devices choose not to use the native Apple Mail app; those subscribers aren't covered by the feature. In short, this change only affects the data received from Apple Mail users.

How to respond

The eNudge team has always advised that statistics like open rates should be used as a guide — most useful as trend indicators of how your contacts interact with your messages over time. They're subject to user behaviour (such as downloading images so eNudge can register an open) and to intermediary technology between eNudge and your contact, including the email client and mail gateways.

Best practice remains the same: keep creating content your subscribers find relevant and interesting, construct compelling subject lines, and use pre‑header text to entice the open — making sure your subject line is congruent with the content. You'll likely already know your average open and click‑through rates (eNudge stores all your campaign data, so you can refer back anytime). When Apple rolls out the change, the impact will be apparent fairly quickly and will give you a new baseline to measure future campaigns against.

Summary

The eNudge team will be monitoring changes in mail statistics after the rollout, and will keep you informed of any further developments.