As of September 20, 2021, Apple rolled out it’s Mail Privacy Protection. This new feature, currently available on Apple mobile devices, allows iPhone and iPad users to avoid reporting opens to all email senders. This means that 47% of cell phone users have a quick way to say ‘no’ to letting you know if your email is opened.

Apple Mail Privacy Protection is available now for all iOS 15 enabled mobile devices and will be available on desktop devices when macOS Monterey rolls out later this year.

With the Mail Privacy Protection, what Apple does is pre-open your Blasts and News Digests, then strip out the tech that tells your email provider who opened the email. The result of this is, you might be seeing artificially higher opens in your Insights.

Our Insights are set up in a way that if there is a click on a message, we make sure you get an open for that message. However, if you’re sending Blasts without links to users that have this new Apple privacy setting enabled, you may not get the full picture of engagement.

PLEASE NOTE: Unlike other privacy changes like GDPR and CCPA, Internal Communicators are NOT immune from this change. An internal audit of our sends this year revealed that about 40% of Blasts sent with Broadcast are delivered to Apple devices. This decision is made by the Apple device user and no technology solution exists to allow email systems to get around this setting.

On our side, we are working on a solution that would quarantine these machine pre-opens so you will know when they occur. In the meantime, we suggest that organizationally, you begin to shift your conversation away from measuring based on opens and instead focus on CLICKS.

If you are looking for advice on this topic, be sure to reach out to your Customer Success Manager.

Note: Apple may not be the last system to enable this type of measure.

If you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at support@cerkl.com or use the support Chat toward the bottom right-hand corner of any cerkl.com page.