private relay

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…