[UPDATED 2025] Apple Mail Privacy Protection: What Every Email Marketer Needs to Know
Mail Privacy Protection introduces new and more effective privacy measures for Apple Mail users. It masks critical data like the IP address, open rates, the number of times a recipient opens emails, and more from email marketers.
Apple prides itself on putting customers first, and Mail Privacy Protection is the byproduct of that philosophy. But how does Apple Mail security affect email users and email marketers? Does it render all metrics useless? Is email marketing dead?
It’s none of that! Our detailed guide simplifies what this Apple Mail privacy feature means for the email industry and how to navigate it.
What is Apple Mail Privacy Protection?
Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) is an email privacy protection feature introduced with iOS 15 and macOS Monterey for Apple’s Mail app. It provides users with enhanced privacy and email security by preventing email senders from tracking their activity through pixels. This directly addresses email privacy issues.
How Apple Mail Tracking Worked Before MPP
Earlier, email senders could use an email tracking pixel for insight into recipient behavior on Apple Mail. Tracking pixels are tiny, invisible images embedded within emails.
These images collect information such as:
- When an email is opened,
- How long it’s read,
- The recipient’s IP address.
This data helped them tailor future emails accordingly.
Before MPP, Apple would not block such pixels.
Mail Privacy Protection now disrupts this tracking mechanism by loading all content remotely. This includes loading tracking pixels through Apple’s proxy servers rather than from the sender’s server, effectively making it a privacy pixel.
Does MPP Block All Remote Content?
MPP doesn’t block all remote content entirely; it primarily focuses on preventing tracking through remote content like images.
This process masks the user’s IP address, preventing senders from tracking when and how their emails are accessed. Mail Privacy Protection Mac and iOS offer the same amount of protection.
What is Remote Content in Email?
Remote content in email refers to email design elements such as:
- Images,
- Stylesheets,
- Any resources that are hosted on a server.
When an email client loads the message, it retrieves these external elements from their respective web servers to fully display the intended design and content. This process is often exploited for tracking purposes, as downloading these resources can reveal information about the recipient.
Apple MPP also provides users with more control over their privacy by allowing them to decide whether to share their actual email address or use a randomly generated one; this feature is called Apple email masking — more on it below.
What is Apple Email Masking?
Apple email masking, also known as “Hide My Email,” is a privacy feature that lets users keep personal email addresses private when signing up for websites, apps, or email marketing newsletters. It’s a part of Apple’s iCloud+ subscription service; both iOS Mail Privacy Protection and Mac Mail Privacy Protection support the feature.
How it works:
- It generates unique, random email addresses: When a user needs to provide an email address, Hide My Email creates a unique, random address, such as xe71h69nd@privaterelay.appleid.com).
- It forwards emails to a real inbox: Emails sent to this random address are automatically forwarded to the actual personal email address.
- It allows users to reply privately: When a user replies to an email, the email is sent through Apple’s servers, so the recipient still doesn’t see your real email address.
- It allows deactivation: If users start receiving unwanted emails, they can deactivate the random address, stopping any further emails from being forwarded to the inbox.
Apple email masking keeps real email addresses hidden from third parties, reducing the risk of spam and targeted advertising. It gives them direct control over who can contact them and helps protect personal information from data breaches.
Should Users Keep Mail Privacy Protection On or Off?
Reasons to Keep Mail Privacy Protection On:
- Enhanced privacy: It prevents senders from accessing email opens, IP addresses, and location data.
- Reduced targeted advertising: It limits the ability of marketers to build detailed profiles based on a subscriber’s email activity.
- Control over data: It gives users more control over what information is shared with email senders.
- Less spam: While not a direct spam filter, it discourages tracking-heavy email practices.
Reasons to Keep Mail Privacy Protection Off:
- Broken email formatting: In very rare cases, some highly specialized emails might rely on tracking pixels for proper email formats. Turning off MPP might resolve display issues, but this is extremely uncommon.
- Accurate read receipts: If a user absolutely needs verifiable read receipts from specific senders for legal or business reasons, MPP will prevent them from working. However, dedicated read receipt features should be used instead of relying on tracking pixels.
We highly recommend you leave this Apple email security feature on, as the pros crush the cons.
Overall, MPP enhances user privacy and security by limiting the amount of information email senders can gather about them without their consent. To understand it better, let’s see how subscriber behavior is tracked via email.
How Mail Tracking Works
Mail tracking is a technique used by email marketers to monitor user engagement and interactions with their emails. It primarily involves the use of a special pixel in email messages.
The process of mail tracking looks like this:
- When an email marketer designs different types of email campaigns, they include tracking pixels within the email content. These pixels are typically small, transparent images (1×1 pixel) or pieces of code hosted on the sender’s web server.
- Each mail pixel contains a unique identifier or code snippet associated with the specific email campaign or recipient. This identifier helps the sender identify which email was opened and by whom.
- When the email is sent to the recipient, the email client, such as Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail, retrieves the email content. This includes the tracking pixel from the sender’s server and the package is sent to the recipient.
- When the recipient opens the email, the email client loads all the content, including the tracking pixel. This triggers a request to the sender’s server, indicating the email has been opened.
- Once the tracking pixel is loaded, the sender’s server logs various data points.
- Each interaction triggers a separate event that is logged by the sender’s server.
- The data collected through tracking pixels is used by marketers to analyze email performance.
But why would Apple want to clamp down on such a harmless feature? A tiny pixel couldn’t possibly cause much trouble, could it?
If you’re wondering just how much information a tracking pixel can give you about a subscriber, the next section might surprise you.
Data Collected by Tracking Pixels
Here is all the information a tracking pixel can collect:
| Type of Data | Description |
|---|---|
| Email opens | It logs email opens by recipients. |
| Location data | It provides information about the geographic location of the recipient when the email is opened. |
| IP address | The server records the IP address of the device used by the recipient to open the email. |
| Device info | It includes details about the recipient’s device, such as the type of device (e.g., desktop, mobile), operating system, browser type, and screen resolution. |
| Email client | The data collected includes information on the email client or application used by the recipient. |
| Timestamps | The pixel records the date and time when the email is opened, providing insights into recipient engagement patterns and behavior. |
| Details of subscriber interaction | Pixels can track user interactions within the email, such as clicks on links, buttons, and images, as well as the duration of time spent reading the email or viewing specific content. |
| Conversion | A tracking pixel can inform the sender when recipients complete specific actions or conversions after interacting with the email. |
Clearly, that is a lot of information; it’s no surprise Apple wanted to put a stop to it.
Tracking pixels may provide valuable insights to email marketers, but they also raise privacy concerns as they enable the tracking of user behavior without explicit consent. As a result, privacy-focused features like MPP aim to mitigate some of these privacy risks by blocking tracking pixels.
How Email Recipients Benefit from Mail Privacy Protection
Mail Privacy Protection was created as a solution to the privacy risks faced by users of Apple’s email services. And it’s extremely efficient — let’s discover how.
1. Enhanced Privacy
Mail Privacy Protection shields recipients from invasive tracking practices commonly employed by email marketers. By blocking the loading of remote content, including tracking pixels, MPP prevents senders from collecting private user data.
2. Reduced Exposure to Spam
With Mail Privacy Protection, recipients have more control over their inboxes and are less susceptible to spam and unwanted emails. By blocking tracking pixels, which are often used by spammers to verify active email addresses, MPP helps reduce the likelihood of recipients’ email addresses being targeted for future campaigns by spam email senders.
3. Protection Against Email Phishing
MPP adds an extra layer of security by preventing email senders from collecting information that could be used for phishing emails. By blocking remote content, recipients are less likely to inadvertently disclose sensitive information or fall victim to phishing scams disguised as legitimate emails.
4. Improved User Experience
By reducing the amount of data accessed by email tracking software, MPP leads to a more streamlined and user-friendly email experience. Recipients can focus on the content of the emails without being concerned about their privacy or the tracking activities of senders.
5. Puts Control in Subscribers’ Hands
MPP empowers recipients to make informed choices about their online privacy. By hiding their IP address and preventing senders from tracking their activity, recipients get better control over their data and the level of privacy they maintain.
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature helps create a safer, more private, and more user-centric email environment.
How Mail Privacy Protection Affects Email Marketing Insights
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection was built to protect email users from malicious individuals, but the feature also affects legitimate marketers and trusted senders, such as yourself.
Without access to Apple Mail open rates and other data provided by tracking pixels, you get less insight. Unfortunately, with a 58.07% market share of global email clients, you cannot afford to ignore Apple’s Mail app.
The Apple Mail Privacy Protection email marketing relationship is entirely based on proxy servers.
Issues marketers face due to MPP include:
| Factor | Explanation |
| Open rates | Email open rates may become less accurate. |
| Email campaign metrics | Metrics such as CTRs and conversion rates may be inaccurate. |
| Opt-in emails | With MPP, onboarding subscribers with explicit consent becomes critical. |
| Email content | A bigger focus is on delivering high-quality, engaging content. |
| Email subject lines | There is no way to test which subject lines are more effective. |
| Email list management | The lack of data makes it more difficult to manage your email lists as you can’t tell which subscribers are engaging with your content. |
| Email Personalization | Without user data, the effectiveness of personalization as a strategy is negatively impacted. |
| Email engagement | Without open rates, there is no way of telling which subscribers are interested in your emails and which ones aren’t. |
| Email Nurture Campaigns | These campaigns depend on user behavior and interaction data to move them through the sales/marketing funnel. This becomes much more challenging without user data. |
| Geographic Segmentation | Without location data, you can’t send geographically-relevant campaigns to a subscriber. |
What Are Apple Privacy Opens?
Apple privacy opens refer to the way Mail Privacy Protection handles remote content in emails.
Instead of a user’s device directly downloading images and assets from a sender’s server when an email is opened, MPP uses Apple’s own servers as an intermediary. When an email arrives, Apple’s email servers proactively fetch all remote content, effectively “opening” the email remotely on behalf of the user.
This serves two goals for Apple:
- This process masks the user’s IP address.
- It prevents senders from knowing exactly when or if the user has viewed the message, preserving user privacy.
By pre-loading content through its own servers, Apple breaks the link between email opens and individual users, enhancing security.
Additional Ways Apple Privacy Concerns Impact Email Marketers
The introduction of Mail Privacy Protection was a game changer for the industry; there’s no doubt about it.
Below, we list additional effects of MPP on email marketers and share solutions for some of them:
- One of the primary impacts of MPP is the masking of open rates to email marketers.
- Metrics such as click-through rates and email marketing conversion rates may be impacted because tracking pixels used to monitor clicks on links within emails are also blocked. This hampers the ability of marketers to understand how recipients interact with their email content and take subsequent actions.
- Email marketers may now need to explore alternative metrics and indicators to evaluate the performance of their campaigns, such as analyzing engagement data available within email clients.
- In the future, there should be more focus on email content relevancy.
- Collecting data on direct interactions with subscribers becomes important. This includes data gathered from website visits, purchases, and other interactions which can be used for behavioral segmentation.
- Marketers must be more transparent about data collection practices. They should provide clear opt-in mechanisms for tracking and prioritize user privacy and consent in their communications.
- Marketers would benefit from diversifying their marketing channels to include social media, SMS marketing, and push notifications to reach their audience.
With MPP in the picture, marketers have no choice but to adapt to these changes and prioritize delivering value-driven content.
But there’s a silver lining — this Apple feature may present challenges in terms of tracking and measuring campaign performance, but it encourages a shift towards more privacy-respecting and user-centric approaches in email marketing.
What are Email Marketers Saying?
This 2022 study gives us the following insights:
- 29% of email marketers said MPP had a negative impact.
- 62% started prioritizing different KPIs.
- 47% felt the impact was neutral.
- 28% started focusing on improving deliverability.
See that last point? It’s the solution in a nutshell.
This is why Mail Privacy Protection doesn’t affect Campaign Refinery customers as much — we’ve always been focused on doing email right!
Campaign Refinery: Ahead of the Curve
At Campaign Refinery, we welcome the steps introduced by Apple. We believe in subscribers’ right to privacy as much as we believe in email as a marketing channel. And we believe that marketers and email users can co-exist in harmony, by doing things right.
Campaign Refinery is all about best practices. This is also why we evaluate our customers before onboarding them; we don’t want spam mail sent from our servers. We have always focused on having the best email sender reputation, so our emails go straight to the Primary Inbox, and it’s working well so far!
But that’s not all. Here are the added benefits of partnering with Campaign Refinery:
- Comprehensive analytics: You will love the analytics dashboard. You only see information that matters, and none of the noise.
- Advanced list cleaning tool: Our automated email validation tool removes any email address that could negatively impact your sender score.
- Security best practices: We require all our clients to implement SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on their domains. The result? Stellar sender reputation, which we enjoy as a team.
- A-grade engagement: If a click rate of 72.76% sounds good to you, try our email gamification feature and see your engagement rates go through the roof.
Besides this, you also get excellent email marketing automation controls, documentation to help you optimize your workflow, a customer service team that dotes on you, and videos and guides to help you get the most out of email marketing.
This is what a sure win looks like! Apply to be a Campaign Refinery customer today.
Post Mail Privacy Protection: Which Metrics to Track in 2025?
Open rates may have lost their teeth, but there’s no need to be disheartened yet. Thankfully, we still have other metrics to fall back on.
The solution lies in these metrics:
| Metric | Definition | Importance Compared to Open Rates |
|---|---|---|
| Click rate | The percentage of recipients who clicked on at least one link within the email. | The click rate indicates recipients’ interest in the content and their willingness to take action, providing insights into the effectiveness of the email’s content and the relevance of links. |
| Click-through rate (CTR) | The percentage of recipients who clicked on one or more links within the email. | CTR reflects the overall performance of the email in driving traffic to specific destinations or actions, offering a more accurate assessment of campaign effectiveness. |
| Click maps | Visual representations of where recipients clicked within an email, often displayed as heatmaps. | Click maps provide detailed insights into recipient behavior by visualizing which links or elements within the email attract the most attention and generate the highest CTR. |
| Conversion rates | The percentage of recipients who completed a desired action after clicking on a link within the email. | Conversion rates represent the ultimate measure of success for email campaigns as they quantify the number of recipients who took a specific action. |
By focusing on these metrics instead, email marketers should be able to fine-tune their strategies for the future. Let’s see what that looks like.
Reduce the Impact of Mail Privacy Protection With Modern Email Marketing Strategies
Adapting email marketing strategies for Mail Privacy Protection is essential. You must adjust tactics and approaches to navigate the challenges posed by limited tracking capabilities.
Key strategies you should consider to counter MPP:
- Collect user data efficiently: The best time to collect user data would be during email lead generation. The second best time would be now — ask them to open the preferences center and share information, so you only send emails they want to receive.
- Optimize subject lines and preview text: Since open rates have become less reliable, optimizing subject lines an preheader text is crucial. You should write attention-grabbing subject lines to entice recipients to open the email, even if open rate tracking is not available.
- Focus on quality content: You should prioritize creating compelling content that resonates with recipients. Encourage them to engage with the email.
- Implement other tracking methods: As traditional tracking dies out, you can explore alternative methods. Try unique URLs or query parameters for tracking clicks, UTM parameters to track campaign performance in analytics, and server-side tracking techniques.
- Enhance segmentation: Your email segmentation strategy becomes critical in the era of Mail Privacy Protection. By segmenting email lists based on subscriber interests, preferences, and behavior, you can deliver tailored content that resonates with specific audience segments.
With enough time, we can move past the insight that open rates gave us and focus on better ways to track email performance.
An Advanced Guidebook on Maximizing Your Inboxing Rate
Mail Privacy Protection is just an early sign of what the future will look like.
It’s time to focus and improve email deliverability. Once you focus on healthy methods to grow your email list and share content with your subscriber base, you will learn how to achieve consistent inbox placement.
Normally, it would take years of experimentation and lots of costly mistakes to get to a point before you realize how the email game works. Unless you could skip it all and just learn from someone far more experienced.
That’s exactly what our founder, Travis Ketchum, had in mind when he wrote The Inbox Formula.
This guidebook is an email marketer’s guide on all the things that actually matter in email marketing. It skips all useless “tips and tricks” and shares tried and tested methods. From domain and IP management to maintaining lists to avoiding spam traps and blacklists, this 24-page book can change your trajectory for good.
The best part? It’s 100% FREE!
Download The Inbox Formula right now.
FAQ
What is the Apple Email Icon?
This is what the Apple Email icon looks like on iPad, iOS, and MacOS.
Should I Use Apple Mail Privacy Protection?
Yes, you should use Apple Mail Privacy Protection to significantly enhance your email privacy by preventing senders from tracking your email activity.
What is Mail Privacy Protection on iPhone?
Mail Privacy Protection on iPhone is a feature that hides your IP address and prevents email senders from knowing when you open their messages.
Is Apple Mail Secure?
Apple Mail, while generally secure, benefits significantly from enabling Mail Privacy Protection for added privacy against tracking.
