Table of Contents

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. 

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.

What to Watch - Post-MPP Engagement Metrics

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.

The User-Agent String and Parsing Proxy Opens

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.

SparkPost has already introduced a few tools to help 14 West and our clients parse out “proxied” opens from a human opening your email:

“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.”

Deeper Impacts of MPP

Opens are not a perfect metric, and it has always come with flaws, as Sparkpost laid out in their recap of the effects MPP will have on the broader email universe. Opens do, however, tell you engagement trends over time. Some call it a vanity metric, but 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 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.

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.  

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.

The 14West Response to Mail Privacy Protection

14West’s Deliverability, Newshift and Data & Analytics teams have taken steps to minimize the short-term impact of Mail Privacy Protection on our clients.

First: We know because of the user-agent string returned by Apple, we can identify users who have opted into Mail Privacy Protection. So for the purposes of segmentation and list hygiene efforts, we will ignore opens from anyone who has opted into MPP. Opens are still being recorded for the purposes of reporting.

Second: When a customer registers the first MPP open, an attribute is now added to their Blueshift profile to identify them an MPP user. This allows you to identify and segment any known email addresses that have opted into MPP.

Third: The Deliverability team has access to data through Everest that can break down the number and type of pre-fetch and proxy opens (including Apple MPP, Google and others) occur in your mailings. For more information about how this affects your open rates, please submit a ticket to the Deliverability team.

The Blueshift Response to Mail Privacy Protection

Blueshift has made a variety of features available, including reporting on Pre-Fetched messages and new segmenting options based on that data. From Blueshift:

In response to Apple’s iOS15 update and its new Mail Privacy Protection Policy (MPP), we’re making updates to our reporting so you can slice and dice different types of opens in your reports. Our Insights reporting and dashboards allow you to filter and group “Open” events by the “Opened by” attribute – you can now see the open count source – whether it’s by mail client using prefetch, by a proxy server or a real human (user). You can also view this information in campaign activity reports under the “extended attributes section.”

In order to help you stay on top of Apple’s iOS15 update […] we’re expanding this support to Segmentation. This means that you can now segment users based on how the email was opened via pre-fetch, proxy or by a real user. You can then run a campaign specifically targeted to this segment of users. One caveat on this is that this feature isn’t available for historical data, you can use this feature for data collected from 2/11/22 onwards.

For more information about these updates:

• https://blueshift.com/blog/ios-15-updates-keep-adapting-to-mail-privacy-and-proxies/

• Segmenting by Pre-fetch: https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001330974-Segment-Examples-

• Feb 2022 Blueshift Update Release notes:https://blueshift.com/library/product-update/release-22-02-2/

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/

6. https://blueshift.com/blog/ios-15-updates-keep-adapting-to-mail-privacy-and-proxies/