Apple Mail Privacy Protection

Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection with iOS 15 in September 2021. It lets people using the Apple Mail app limit how much email senders can track, and it has a big effect on open rates. This article explains what the feature does and how it affects the way you measure and automate your email marketing.

What is Mail Privacy Protection?

Mail Privacy Protection is a privacy setting in the Apple Mail app on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Users choose whether to protect their Mail activity from senders. If they select the Protect Mail activity option, Apple Mail hides their IP address and loads remote content privately.

In its official announcement, Apple described the feature like this:

How does it work?

When the feature is turned on, it applies to any email opened in the Apple Mail app, whichever email provider the account is with. For example, if someone has a Gmail account and reads it in the Apple Mail app, Mail Privacy Protection still applies. It does not apply to other email apps used on an Apple device, such as the Gmail app on an iPhone.

For people who have it turned on, Apple routes emails through a proxy server and pre-loads the message content before it reaches the user. This includes the tracking pixel used to detect opens, so the email is recorded as opened even if the recipient never opens it. If the recipient does open the email later, it loads from a cache rather than from the sender's web host, so the real open is not tracked either.

What does that mean for email marketing?

Emails sent to Apple Mail users with Mail Privacy Protection turned on will show as opened, even if the recipient ignores them. Open rates are therefore less accurate whenever your audience includes these users. Content that depends on the recipient's location also cannot be displayed accurately when an email is opened in Apple Mail.

These are the main areas to watch:

• Campaign performance tracking: Open rates from Apple Mail users are not reliable, so focus on other metrics, such as click-through rates and conversions, to judge the success of a campaign.
• Journeys with delays based on opens: Any Journeys with delay stages that depend on email opens are affected, because the false open is recorded when the email is cached.
• Email testing: Subject line tests, or any other test that uses open rate to pick a winner, will not give accurate results when sent to Apple Mail users.
• Email list cleaning: Segmentation based on opens is affected too, so sunset policies and other list health strategies that rely on opens may not work as intended.
• Segmented or automated campaigns based on opens: Some nurture Journeys, onboarding emails and re-engagement campaigns use opens to decide which email a contact receives next. False opens could send contacts down the wrong path or give them the wrong email.

There is one small upside. Because the false open is only recorded when the Apple Mail app has loaded the message, it tells you the email was delivered to a working mailbox, but not that the contact has actually read it.

Summary

• Mail Privacy Protection only applies to contacts who read email in the Apple Mail app and have the feature turned on. It does not apply to other email apps on Apple devices.
• For those contacts, every email shows as opened, even if they have not opened it. If they do open it afterwards, that open is not visible because of the caching.
• Clicks are still tracked, so they are a more dependable measure of engagement.
• This change affects every email sender, not just Force24 customers.