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 current market share of both is expected around 57%.

This is probably a fuzzier statistic than I’d like it to be, but we can I think safely say that a lot of emails are going through this ecosystem.

As a publisher you probably have two statistics that you are using to determine performance via your ESP: open rate (the number of people who opened your email for any amount of time, judged by a small invisible image that is loaded uniquely per subscriber), and click through rate (the number of people who clicked on one or more of the links in the email, judged by each link being tracked via a forwarding service). Apple have just clearly wiped out one of those.

We don’t know how Apple accomplish this, but I think it’s safe to assume that it’s similar to how Hey.com announced their privacy push in their email client. Hey keep a denylist of tracker addresses and scan your email for elements that look like they could…