[FAQ]

G’day,

I’m an analyst for an e-commerce company in Sydney, and I’m having trouble with our email reporting. Ever since Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), our reported open rates for a big chunk of our list have gone through the roof, sitting at close to 100%, which obviously isn’t right.

It’s making it impossible to accurately report on the success of our subject lines or to know if people are actually seeing our campaigns. Can anyone explain in simple terms what MPP is actually doing?

Is the open rate a dead metric now? What are other marketers focusing on instead to measure top-of-funnel engagement?

Cheers for any insights.

[Jeff Bullas]

A critical question. MPP has fundamentally changed how we must measure email engagement.

Short Answer: Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection impacts open rates by pre-loading all email images through a proxy server, which artificially inflates your open rate metric to nearly 100% for Apple Mail users. This makes the traditional open rate an unreliable measure of actual engagement for that segment of your audience.

The key is to accept that the open rate is no longer a reliable key performance indicator and to shift your focus to metrics that measure genuine user interaction.

Traditionally, an “open” is tracked by placing a tiny, invisible 1×1 pixel image in every email. When your email client loaded the images in the email, it would download that pixel, and your email platform would count that download as an open. Apple’s MPP disrupts this by automatically pre-loading all image content through their own proxy servers the moment the email arrives in the inbox, not when the user opens it. This means the tracking pixel is fired for every single email sent to an Apple Mail user with this feature enabled, regardless of whether they ever actually open or read it.

The result is that your open rate for this segment of your audience becomes a meaningless, artificially high number. It makes A/B testing text-based subject lines impossible and gives you a false sense of security about your campaign’s reach.

The strategic pivot is to stop treating the open rate as your primary metric for success. Instead, you must now focus on metrics that measure deliberate action. The most important metric is now your click-through rate. A user clicking a link on your text or images is an undeniable signal of genuine engagement that cannot be faked by a proxy server. Beyond clicks, you should focus on your ultimate business goals, like conversion rates, reply rates, and website traffic from email. The game is no longer about earning an open; it’s about creating content so valuable that it earns a click.

Cheers,
Jeff

[Author]

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