apple
Here’s a quick and simple post where I take a moment to share with you the stats from my Spam Resource email newsletter sends — you might have already seen this in the CSA webinar I just did with Marcel Becker from Yahoo. But if not, here you go! As you can see courtesy of the pac-man-like thing above (please don’t sue me, whoever owns pac-man), just a hair under 18% of my tracked opens seem to fall into the Apple MPP category, based on the referrer. (I know that going off of referrer alone is slightly inaccurate, but that’s the easy way to do it and I’m lazy.) This “about 18%” number seems to be pretty static from week-to-week of late. The net here is that my data is a lot different than the data from Sparkpost and others. Their data isn’t wrong — indeed, Sparkpost’s data is a lot more…
Since the latest iOS 15 update, Apple has introduced restrictions on the tracking of data on users who use Apple Mail. After several studies on the actual impacts of these restrictions, news arrives on the MailUp platform in the Statistics Area to limit the “damage” of this Apple Mail Privacy Protection. Let’s start with the basics: what is Mail Privacy Protection? This is a novelty that Apple has introduced with the new iOS15 update in the area of Email Marketing and tracking of users’ personal data. In this blog article we started giving some advice to manage this Apple novelty and to monitor the evolution of its impacts over the months. In recent months, the consequences of the Apple update seem to have become stable, and it is therefore time to update our guidelines for handling Apple problems and present the platform’s news to address them in a more informed…
In September 2021 Apple introduced Apple Mail Privacy Protection (further referred to as AMPP), a new feature in the native Mail app, helping users to…
Okay, they’re not really opens. They’re proxy-based, false positive pre-loaded opens. Don’t think of them as opens. Think of them as something you want to get out of the way so as to not inflate your campaign tracking. I know, I know… Apple is not the only one proxying opens today. But they’re the big one — over the past few weeks, Apple MPP “opens” have been 25-30% of my opens tracked for each Spam Resource newsletter. And if you’re a typical B2C sender, your percentage is likely even higher.So let’s say you run an email sending platform and you want to give users an option to suppress these opens from tracking. How do you do that?Look for any open that has the very generic referrer of “Mozilla/5.0” with nothing else. This is probably low effort, but keep in mind that it is imperfect. In my testing, 95% of the…
Yeah, I know. Apple blew up open tracking. Other things have been gnawing away at it for a while, but where we’re at now is that for anybody who reads their email messages on a modern iPhone, whether or not they opened the message is no longer something an email sending platform can track accurately. Sparkpost points out that we’re basically at the saturation point: 45-55% of all opens are now now via Apple MPP-enabled users (and thus cannot be trusted).But you know what Apple didn’t break? Your ability to identify (most) of the unengaged. If you’re looking to segment out your unengaged subscribers, those who haven’t opened or clicked in months, proceed as you would have prior to MPP. There’s a margin of error that wasn’t there before — you won’t catch all of the unengaged — but truly, people who show as never having registered? They’re still very…
Is this every possible blog post or FAQ page explaining Apple’s MPP changes aka the death of open tracking? No, probably not. But here’s a bunch. Some I found myself, others were shared with me by many kind folks in the deliverability space. If you want to work your way through all of the guidance to see what you can glean from it, here you go.Act-On: What Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection Means for the Modern MarketerAct-On: Apple MPP Adapt Series: Data AcquisitionAweber: Apple iOS 15 Mail Privacy Protection Open Rate TrendsBraze: 9 Smart Ways Email Marketers Can Respond to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection FeatureCampaign Monitor: A Marketer’s Guide to Apple’s Mail Privacy ProtectionConstant Contact: How Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection Impacts Email MarketingCordial: Will iOS 15 break the internet?Emma: Deliverability Insights: How Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection will impact the 2021 holiday seasonHubSpot: How HubSpot’s Email Team is Responding to iOS 15Kickbox:…
“It’s like Apple’s new Hide My Email feature, but it works everywhere,” according to The Verge. And it’s powered by email platform Fastmail, perhaps a bit of a niche provider, but I mean that in a good way. Founded in 1999, Fastmail hast a long history in the email space (unlike Hey.com) and they seem to know what they’re doing (look at their recent added support for BIMI). If you want to “hide my email” but don’t want to do it via the Apple ecosystem, it sounds like this is really worth checking out.Click here for more information on Masked Email from Fastmail and 1Password.Firefox Relay is another service with a similar aim, perhaps for those who are more into the Mozilla mindset, if there is such a thing. I actually haven’t heard of anybody expressing a lot of interest in this one, have you?The big question for me, for all…
A while back I wrote about Apple Mail Privacy Protection, what it does and how it works. Since MPP was first announced I’d assumed that it would be built on the same infrastructure as iCloud Private Relay, Apple’s VPN product, but hadn’t seen anything from Apple to explicitly connect the two and didn’t have access to enough data to confirm it independently. But the nice folks at MailChimp did gather enough image load data to confirm that the two are related, and prompted me to look into Private Relay a bit more. Apple have a nice description of Private Relay from the consumer perspective in their support pages, but the interesting bits are in their technical info for network admins. Their description there matches my black box testing of MPP image loads exactly, but the bit that clinches it is the directions for how enterprise networks can block private relay…
You’ve probably heard about Apple Mail Privacy Protection. Email marketing chat has been all a-twitter about it since it was announced in June. Skipping over all the “Openpocalypse” panic, what is it and what does it do? Image Loads It’s all about images in email and how they’re loaded (particularly invisible one pixel images that are used solely for tracking). Why do we care about image loads? Email marketers and ESPs have used the metadata included with image loads for years to grab information and metrics from their recipients. By using a unique name for an image they can tell when a particular recipient loads that image. That image load correlated with a particular recipient is what ESPs describe as “an Open”, and it means that means the sender knows the recipient read the email. They’ll often use an invisible, single pixel image that can be easily added to every…
Thanks to William Gallagher from Apple Insider for letting us know that Apple has launched the ability to configure a custom email domain with iCloud Mail. It’s explicitly noted as being in beta, and it sounds like the process is a bit buggy so far, but they’ll get it worked out, and I have a feeling that this could be the start of something big. Click on through to read more.