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This is pretty neat. Writes Ben Lovejoy for 9TO5Mac: When configuring custom email domain settings on iOS, you can even buy a domain name directly from the iPhone. Kind of neat, if you’re mobile-first. And one assumes you’ll be able to access the resulting configured custom email account from desktop as well.
Here’s an updated version of a guide I put together back in 2016 to help folks understand how the list-unsubscribe functionality works on Apple Mail on iOS.It was back in 2016 that we learned that Apple planned to add list-unsubscribe support to Apple’s iOS email client, and that support came with iOS 10. Many ESPs have long supported a special header, the “list unsubscribe” header. Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Outlook.com, along with some other email clients or platforms, look for this header, and if it is found, they’ll put some sort of prominent “unsubscribe” link or button in a special place in their user interface. At Gmail, in particular, this header tends to show only for “good” senders, so if you’re a sender and you do see this extra unsubscribe link when sending to Gmail subscribers, know that Gmail probably considers your mail stream to be a wanted and safe one.
Thanks to a new feature in iOS 16, it’s pretty easy for you to schedule an email you’re writing to be automatically sent in the future at a certain time. Check out the how-to here, courtesy of Mac Observer.And if you’re looking for more information on all the different new email-related features in iOS 16, here you go, courtesy of Apple Insider.
Over on the Oracle Blog, Clint Kaiser, Daniel Deneweth, Jason Witt note that we’re at the one year anniversary of the launch of the Apple Mail Privacy Protection functionality. How did it impact marketers? How does it impact analytics, email deliverability, live content, and email design? The smart gentlemen from Oracle answer these questions and more … read it all here.
Check it out — it’s our first taste of BIMI on iOS outside of beta. Apple iOS users who upgrade to iOS 16 can now see a BIMI logo associated with an email send, depending on what mailbox provider they use. All four of these CNN Newsletter signup emails were opened and viewed on the default Apple mail client in iOS 16.0.2, and as you can see, iCloud and Fastmail users get shown the BIMI logo for CNN! You’ll note that no logo is displayed for the Yahoo and Gmail subscribers, even though both platforms support BIMI (and CNN has the Gmail-required VMC in place). Why Fastmail and not Gmail or Yahoo? I suspect that Fastmail was quickest to implement an updated “authentication results” header that includes information about the BIMI logo checks, and I don’t think Gmail and Yahoo are including that information. Yet? It seems likely that they’ll catch
We knew that BIMI support was coming to Apple iOS and MacOS. And now, Apple has published a support page: Prepare your email server for BIMI support in Apple Mail. Reading through the guide, it sounds like support might go beyond just Apple iCloud (mac.com, me.com, icloud.com) domains, if other mailbox providers structure their headers properly. If this support is client-based and not recipient domain based, that could really make things interesting. Here’s hoping I’m reading that right.For more on Apple’s rollout of BIMI support, check out this update from the Authindicators (BIMI) Working Group.
More fun, more webinars, more info, all about Apple Mail Privacy Protection, aka MPP!If you’re curious about the current state of Apple MPP and how it impacts marketers, my Kickbox colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz and I presented a live webinar on this very topic recently. Head on over to the Kickbox blog where you can read a recap of the webinar and view the webinar recording.
Here’s a great article from Sella Yoffe over on the Webbula blog, where he provides an overview of Apple’s “Hide my Email” functionality and helps explain the challenges this functionality presents to email marketers: Apple Hide My Email – A Burner Phone for Email: How Does Apple Hide My Email Affect Email Marketers.Want to learn more about Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP)? Don’t forget to check out the Apple MPP section here on Spam Resource. And stay tuned for a recap and recording link for the recent Apple MPP webinar I co-presented! Coming soon.
If you haven’t figured it out just yet, I’m trying to do webinars more often nowadays, because it’s a very useful way to share information, and people always seem to be interested in learning more about deliverability. The topic this time around is Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). You know, that thing screwing up the open detection pixel your email service provider platform uses to help you
This is all subject to change, of course. Currently, we’re only as far as the first version of the iOS 16 Public Beta, and much could be different by the time we get to the actual final (non-beta) release version of iOS, which is said to launch late in 2022. But already, BIMI logo support is indeed in there, as you can see from screenshots of this email from Zillow, as viewed on my trusty iPhone SE (2020). Never have I been so happy so see a squiggly Z before today.In my testing, I found that the logo shows only for mail sent to iCloud accounts; I tested this with Gmail as well (both in the iOS Mail application) and logos didn’t work for any non-Apple domain recipients. Will that change? I hope so; it’d be nice if this were recipient-domain agnostic, like how Apple MPP is. Also, logos don’t show