MPP: An Overview

The What, and some Why: As described by Apple, MPP “stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. The new feature helps users prevent 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.”

The Who and Where: The endpoint of where the email is opened is what’s important here, not the mail service. If an email account is configured on the Mail app on iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey devices, it will have the option to not be tracked. It does not appear to affect addresses only configured on other mail apps (Outlook, Gmail) used on iOS, iPadOS, or macOS devices.

Generally, we expect this to impact 30-40% of a recipient’s user list. 

Guidance for recording a video tutorial

Privacy Protection vs Open Tracking

Apple’s release of MPP is another step in a longer journey towards greater focus on consumer privacy. Although the changes might feel overwhelming at first, it is a great opportunity to reevaluate your engagement reporting strategy and place more focus on the metrics that matter.

As you start to observe changes to your engagement metrics (if you haven’t already), don’t panic. You have the information you need to look beyond your skewed open rates for a more complete and accurate view of campaign performance.

Table of contents

Rough notes

Apple MPP Document

 As described by Apple, MPP “stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. The new feature helps users prevent 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.”

The mail service doesn’t matter here. The endpoint of where the email is opened is what’s important here. If an email is opened on the Mail app on iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey devices, it will have the option to not be tracked via the user privacy selection shown in the screenshot above.

Apple’s release of MPP is another step in a longer journey towards greater focus on consumer privacy. Although the changes might feel overwhelming at first, it is a great opportunity to reevaluate your engagement reporting strategy and place more focus on the metrics that matter.

As you start to observe changes to your engagement metrics (if you haven’t already), don’t panic. You have the information you need to look beyond your skewed open rates for a more complete and accurate view of campaign performance.

Places to look since Opens suck:

·         Inbox placement rates. Unlike delivered rates, which simply measure sent less bounced, inbox placement rates can be used as a proxy for open rates. Mailbox providers consider subscriber engagement (whether positive or negative) when making spam filtering decisions. Therefore, great open rates mean better inbox placement.

·         Sender reputation signals. Similar to inbox placement rates, your sender reputation is impacted by subscriber engagement. So, your reputation scores provide important clues as to whether emails generate positive or negative engagement.

·         Deeper funnel metrics. Metrics deeper down in the conversion funnel, such as clicks, website visits, and conversions, did not go away with MPP. In fact, they provide even stronger indications of subscriber interest than your open rates did. Combining these metrics with your deliverability metrics (listed above) allows you to connect the dots and effectively measure true campaign performance beyond opens.

·         Zero-party data. There is now a greater need to focus on acquiring “zero-party data.” This is data customers intentionally and proactively share. If subscribers genuinely value their privacy, but also want to receive relevant and personalized messages, they will provide the information to brands they like and trust. With zero-party data, you can continue to have access to valuable subscriber data that you lose with MPP and can use this data to deliver the relevant and personalized communications your subscribers expect.

·         List hygiene. Regular list validation becomes even more critical in an MPP world. Many senders rely on open rate data to inform their inactive strategies. Now, you can no longer rely on this information to make decisions to suppress inactive email addresses. Instead, you must put more focus on regular validation of the email addresses you’re sending to so you can identify addresses that are no longer working. If you don’t, you’re likely to see a hit to your reputation and inbox placement.

Opens are not a perfect metric, and it has always come with flaws. It does, however, tell you engagement trends over time. Some call it a vanity metric, which is a myopic view. The technology behind opens powers more than an engagement metric (even if that metric is flawed). It also makes a lot of the cool innovation in the email space possible, which is now up to question. 

There’s a lot to unpack here, but here is what we think the impact will be:

·        Lack of being able to use opens as part of a list hygiene/segmentation strategy. Without access to opens, senders will need to rely on clicks and deeper behaviors to know if a real human is still there and interested in the content to keep receiving it. Opens (and the lack-thereof) have long been an important leading indicator of user disengagement which promoted early removal/retargeting of disengaged users. Some senders might even fall into bad sending practices by not having this metric to use for segmentation. We suspect Q4 (and beyond) deliverability might be challenging for some senders that aren’t ready for this.

• Subject line testing that relies upon open tracking will be flawed. This will no longer be an easy thing to test for Apple Mail users. Metrics like clicks and conversions that are further down the email conversion funnel from the subject line will have to be used. Companies that use Natural Language Processing to optimize subject lines will need to rethink their strategy in order to update the algorithms that support the effectiveness of their products when it comes to recipients using the Mail App. However, subject line testing that relies upon data from panel engagement, such as SparkPost subject line predict and subject line advisor, will continue to provide relevant insights and predictions.

• Send-time optimization will also be flawed because it often takes opens into account as part of its algorithm to determine the right time to send the email based on open and click engagement. We do believe that products like Verizon’s View Time Optimization will be unaffected by this.

·        Open-time personalization/live content will be broken. We’ve seen cool innovation in recent years with weather widgets and store locators based on your location at the time of open. Other innovations that will be impacted will be device trackers that detect the operating system to tell you to download the app via the App Store or Google Play. Countdown timers will probably not work due to the caching by Apple at mail inception. Anything that draws from context at the time of open (location, time, device, etc) through open tracking is potentially at risk.

·        Data strategies for locale-specific privacy laws (like GDPR) or service availability will need to be rethought if they use email opens or clicks from emails to establish recipient residency.

·        Monitoring inbox placement will become an even more crucial metric to track because assuming your emails have landed in the inbox based on opens will no longer be reliable.

Sparkpost Updates:

On the sending side, we have recently added a field to both Signals Webhooks and the Events API to indicate when an open has been pre-fetched. These opens will still be included since they can be a valuable signal that an email address is valid. (Specifically, they indicate that the email address is linked to a powered-on Apple device, so it’s almost certainly associated with a “real” human being.) Nevertheless, the new flag will make it easy to see that these opens are different from actual engagement events and should be treated differently.  Next up, we’ll be adding the ability to distinguish prefetched and proxy opens in our Analytics Report UI and Metrics API.

Below are four insights on the more nuanced and not immediately obvious impacts of the iOS 15 changes.

1. The Impact Goes Beyond iCloud.com Email Accounts

Mail Privacy Protection will impact any email account that is set up within the Apple Mail.app in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, or MacOS Monterey. Generally, we expect this to impact 30-40% of a recipient’s user list. 

2. Users Don’t Need to Actively Use Mail.App for Email to be Impacted by Mail Privacy Protection

Let’s consider a common scenario: a user sets up their email account in Apple Mail.app, Gmail’s App, and also routinely makes use of the Gmail Web App. Even if the user rarely (or never) opens their email in Apple Mail.app, Mail Privacy Protection will still pre-load images because the email account was set up in Apple’s Mail.app. In this case, a sender will see opens from Apple’s image proxy and Gmail’s image proxy.  

3. Regularly Monitor for Changes to the User-Agent String

Per Google, a browser’s user-agent string helps identify which browser is being used, what version, and on which operating system. Currently, the user-agent string that Apple’s proxy servers are sending when requesting images is Mozilla/5.0. While there is no direct indication that this belongs to Apple’s image proxies, our testing indicates that the string does accurately identify requests coming from Apple’s image proxies. This, in turn, may allow senders to filter out Apple proxy opens from their metrics or segment them differently. It is unknown whether Apple will change this in the future. As such, it will be important for senders to monitor for changes to this string and to adjust accordingly.

4. Do Not Depend On Technical Hacks or Workarounds

History has shown us that any technical workarounds to bypassing privacy-related functionality are often short-lived, harms your reputation, and are quickly closed. Even though early testing indicates there are some workarounds to Apple’s preloading of images, we believe senders should not rely upon or use these workarounds. 

The following Mail Privacy Protection limitations have been observed in early beta testing:

·        Preloading primarily happens when the user is on wifi and when plugged in.
Early testing indicates that preloading only happens when the user is on wifi and their phone is plugged into power. This behavior is a little unexpected and will be interesting to observe as Apple moves to General Availability for iOS15. In practice, what this means is that the open events are even more random than initially thought. It seems open events can occur when the user actually opens the message, or when the user hasn’t opened the message but is on wifi and the phone is charging – or some other combination of events that Apple decides. All of this points to the same conclusion: open tracking on Apple devices can’t be trusted.

·        User-initiated open events are triggered when the image is loaded via external CSS.
Testing also indicates that user-initiated open events are triggered when the image is loaded via an external CSS file. While on the surface this might seem like good news, we strongly recommend against using this approach. It’s extremely likely that Apple, like HEY already did, will close this loophole. (Read the Twitter thread.)

But there is a more fundamental reason not to use this approach: users who have opted into Mail Privacy Protection have explicitly said they do not want providers tracking them via email opens. Using these sort of workarounds betrays that user trust, is bad-practice, and ultimately harms your brand’s reputation.

Change is inevitable. And with change, comes uncertainty.  

It’s important to remember that the ultimate goal was never about tracking opens – but instead to reach our target audience by sending emails that recipients want to engage with. As long as senders keep that as their north star, we’ll all adapt together to find new user and privacy-centric ways to measure the results.

FAQS

Related Content

1. https://wordtothewise.com/2021/09/apple-mpp/

2. https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/sparkpost-product-updates-apple-ios15/

3. https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/impact-of-ios-15-update-on-open-tracking/

4. https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/4-insights-on-ios-15-mail-privacy-protection/

5. https://www.validity.com/blog/apples-mail-privacy-protection-is-here/

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