Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection is lazy and hurts small publishers

At WWDC yesterday Apple announced Mail Privacy Protection, an initiative seeking to bring blocking of Superhuman style tracking pixels to Apple’s Mail app.

In the video demo Katie Skinner, Manager of User Privacy Software, introduced marketing emails as using invisible pixels to collect your activity, such as your IP address, and when you open or take an action in these emails. Their solution is Mail Privacy Protection.

It hides your IP address so senders can’t link it to your online activity, or determine your location. And it prevents senders from seeing if and when you’ve opened their email. So now you can catch up on email with greater peace of mind.

That’s it, that’s all we know so far. And though focused in this context on marketing emails, it has significant implications for publishers and the newsletter boom.

Litmus, an email marketing consultancy, estimated that the top email client globally is Mail on iPhone, with 38.9% of opens coming from the app in the first three months of this year. On desktop, if this feature launches on Apple Mail there, that’s another 11.5% of sends. The…