Apple Putting a Stop to Email Tracking Pixels With Mail Privacy Protection in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey

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It’s annoying for apple mail to have all these great privacy features but lacking basic features that all other mail client have, like send later mail, giving a distinct color for each account connected or customizable notifications. I want Spark features with Apple privacy policy

Mail does have customizable notifications - Rules.

 

[jk1221]

The feature is called "Mail Privacy Protection" and this is the description. Where is spam mentioned?

Sorry, referring to the article title here. Not that Apple said its pixel blocking.

A lot of tech sites are implying its something it is not.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Apple Mail for the win. I am so glad Apple is stepping up security even more.

 

[Lyoha]

This is exactly why most people disable remote-loaded images.

When a company sends spam and the pixel is loaded, they know the address is live. That's valuable. That's used and resold.

The fact that Apple immediately and automatically confirms the address is live (but this isn't done across the internet for all addresses, it's ONLY done for live addresses) means this feature is actively harmful to anybody who really cares about tracking pixels.

I have domain placeholders that forward to my icloud-managed email. If every single one of those spam messages I get for all the guessed emails are confirmed as live, then my spam is going to grow exponentially. MOST of it is filtered now. But the ones that aren't are going to grow exponentially too.

It's not a perfect solution, but it lets you see the pretty emails while giving the advertisers noise. Paired with Apple's burner email addresses they give you, it's a decent step in the right direction.

 

[jk1221]

This is exactly why most people disable remote-loaded images.

When a company sends spam and the pixel is loaded, they know the address is live. That's valuable. That's used and resold.

The fact that Apple immediately and automatically confirms the address is live (but this isn't done across the internet for all addresses, it's ONLY done for live addresses) means this feature is actively harmful to anybody who really cares about tracking pixels.

I have domain placeholders that forward to my icloud-managed email. If every single one of those spam messages I get for all the guessed emails are confirmed as live, then my spam is going to grow exponentially. MOST of it is filtered now. But the ones that aren't are going to grow exponentially too.

Truth be told I have tried (legit with unsubscribe and not spamming the world) email marketing for one of my businesses in the past.

And ALL I cared about was opens. If they opened it was fair game to send more. If not then why bother? I could not care who clicked what time or day, location, etc. All I cared was- is it effective yes or not.

Many many small businesses only care if you opened it- not when, where and how. It's did they get engagemnt or not from emailing.

To me remote images disabled is still better overall.

 

[neuropsychguy]

I'll copy part of Apple's statement (emphasis added) for those of you who don't read the article and just comment.

If you choose to turn it on, Mail Privacy Protection helps protect your privacy by preventing email senders, including Apple, from learning information about your Mail activity. When you receive an email in the Mail app, rather than downloading remote content when you open an email, Mail Privacy Protection downloads remote content in the background by default - regardless of how you do or don't engage with the email. Apple does not learn any information about the content.
In addition, all remote content downloaded by Mail is routed through multiple proxy servers, preventing the sender from learning your IP address. Rather than share your IP address, which can allow the email sender to learn your location, Apple's proxy network will randomly assign an IP address that corresponds only to the region your device is in. As a result, email senders will only receive generic information rather than information about your behavior. Apple does not access your IP address.

As Lyoha pointed out. This turns all email activity into noise. Every email is opened when it is sent. Senders lose the information about when and where an email was opened. They lose any sort of discriminating information (term used broadly) from any email. If you are a legitimate advertiser, why keep sending spam emails if you don't get any useful information back other than that might be a real email address (but not necessarily monitored email address). Advertisers will still be able to get information if people click on links in the emails but otherwise, it's just noise. This is turning the volume up to 11 on every marketing email.

 

[I7guy]

This really does virtually nothing to improve your privacy.

Tracking pixels are generally unique to the email. They don't care what IP address you open the email from - they care that they sent an email to an address, and it got opened. The person trying to snoop on you has still learned that yours is a valid email address that an actual human looks at and they've also learned what time that human looked at it.

Your IP is already randomly changing - your ISP changes it periodically, and if you're on a mobile device, you likely change between networks entirely periodically, meaning your IP is changing.

Apple seems to be offering something that's of zero value for $1/month, and what's worse is they're advertising it. It's basically snake oil.

I’ve learned that the more criticism Apple receives for a feature, the more on-track and on-target they are with the feature. Case in point.

 

[neuropsychguy]

Truth be told I have tried (legit with unsubscribe and not spamming the world) email marketing for one of my businesses.

And ALL I cared about was opens. If they opened it was fair game to send more. If not then why bother?

To me remote images disabled is still better overall.

This will hurt your marketing. Every email you send will be marked as opened (at least to people using an iOS device). That's useless data back to you.

 

[BenGoren]

They also ignored whether this is better or worse than disabling remote image loading. Considering in theory no remote images means zero data for them. So is that ht better way? 🤷‍♂️

This lets you read pretty-format emails that you might be interested in without whomever sent it tracking you. So, yes.

Just a trivial example…say you do R&D for your company, and you want to stay informed as to what the competition is doing. So you sign up to promotional emails from the competition. Do you really want them to know which of your colleagues you forward which of their emails to?

Or, you’re for or against any one of today’s hot-button political topics. And, similarly, you subscribe to newsletters from the other side. When you forward a particularly outrageous example to your circle of friends, is that something you want the “other” side to know about?

b&

 

[4jasontv]

Right but unless everyone on earth does that they are just going to keep spamming people who opened. Rather than it coming back unopened and giving up at some point.

It's really being misrepresented as spam/pixel tracking blocking when it's not if that is the idea to it.

I struggle to see how this is better than disabling remote images still which does both- no open data, no data at all since it was never read.

I get this may be a good middle ground for the average person not to fiddle with images, but they failed to explain the differences completely considering it was a big part of the tech nerdy privacy section in a developer conference of tech nerds.

Disabling remote images isn't feasible for most people who want to see the email. Some emails, such as Best Buy and Target are all images, and while I might want to know what their sale is this week I don't want them to know I read the message.

Spamming all tracked email that runs through an Apple server as read makes the tracking data unreliable. This would be improved if Apple caches the images and then allows the user to pull from the cache instead of the senders server. It would require a massive amount of storage for Apple, but if anyone can implement the feature it's Apple.

 

[npmacuser5]

Turn off load images in the Apple mail App. Then manually load images for the very few important known emails. 99% of my emails on Apple mail have zero images. Upside, faster loading, less data, much better security. Another opotion already available.

 

[4jasontv]

This will hurt your marketing. Every email you send will be marked as opened (at least to people using an iOS device). That's useless data back to you.

Since Apple would know if you did or did not open the email, it wouldn't take long to identify Spam on a user-by-user basis.

 

[Lyoha]

Turn off load images in the Apple mail App. Then manually load images for the very few important known emails. 99% of my emails on Apple mail have zero images. Upside, faster loading, less data, much better security. Another opotion already available.

You're not wrong, but new ways of doing things are also a good thing.

 

[katbel]

Turn off load images in the Apple mail App. Then manually load images for the very few important known emails. 99% of my emails on Apple mail have zero images. Upside, faster loading, less data, much better security. Another opotion already available.

This is what I'm doing since ever, never load images and if I'm interested in something I go straight to the website
and never click on anything in the email.
How can a pixel image get to my mailbox if nothing is loaded?!

 

[v3rlon]

About the blocking, years ago a reputably company I do business withal to expand their internet service due to an upcoming product release. Many of use were not getting our notification emails and complained. It turned out the Servers/IP addresses that the new emails were coming from had been blacklisted for bad behavior by the previous tenants. It is possible to find questionable real estate in cyberspace also.

I find this new option to be a nice idea for as long as it works.

I reckon it will take about 8 minutes of actually working before someone sues Apple because of this.
"Customers prefer invisible tracking pixels"
"Its an anti-trust violation because [legal doublespeak] the dilithium Crystal matrix can't take much more of this cap'n [/legal doublespeak]"
"It gives Apple a monopoly on private email."
"Chewbacca living on Endor does not make sense—and if even mentioning Chewbacca in the case does not make sense, you must find against Apple."

 

[visualseed]

This is easily bypassed though by assigning a unique reference to any of the images. For example, your company logo could be domain.com/<guid>/logo.png, where guid is a reference in your backend database related to the email address you sent it to.

Depends on how much overhead apple wants to invest, but when you are handling hundreds of millions to billions of emails you can quickly spot patterns in whole messages or in parts and they can very easy sample these images when they are first seen and uuencode then or proxy them for subsequent messages without resolving every URL. Systems that do this have moved a long way from simple string replacement and are quite reliable and efficient. CDNs have being caching, proxying, and forwarding images and content from generated URLs for years without issue and it would be nothing to prevent the web server from knowing about the request.

Edit: Sorry showing my age. Base64 encoded instead of UUencoded

 

[gogomilo77]

The private relay feature is good, but there are downsides. For example, some ISPs (not all sell your info on) use DNS to help keep children secure online, by preventing certain sites from being accessed should the parents wish. Also, should someone attempt to access some illegal content, would Apple stop access to that site? If so, how do Apple decide what sites people can and can’t access? Would be very similar to the control on the App Store. How do we know Apple or the third party won’t start policing or shaping traffic to certain sites. All of a sudden websites or users may need to start paying extra to access sites at faster speeds. For me too much control. Finally, no matter what Apple says, there will be a negative effect on speeds, and what happens if there is an outage? All of a sudden all Apple users will have no access!

 

[npmacuser5]

You're not wrong, but new ways of doing things are also a good thing.

Always in favor of new and better, good point. The new solves one problem. The other benefits faster loading, significant data on network and storage a savings I like.

 

[hot-gril]

The only way to fight this, that I can think of, is to mark all emails that have such tracking as read. Combine this with disposable email and spam filters and the reliability of tracking decreases.

Disabling loading remote content by default is the best way to deal with this. I hardly ever need to load remote content in an email. Just about 0 human senders will ever put that content in, and the few bot senders I care about probably won't either. If they do, I hit "load," no big deal.

 

[Mc0]

There’s nothing really wrong about getting info back from recipients (except of course location info). I work for a company that organize big events and mail receipt notification is one of the things we look into. Whether they open our emails or not help us decide if we need to send another confirmation email to them.

 

[hot-gril]

It’s annoying for apple mail to have all these great privacy features but lacking basic features that all other mail client have, like send later mail, giving a distinct color for each account connected or customizable notifications. I want Spark features with Apple privacy policy

A lot of these limitations are because it's a local mail client, not a cloud one. But there are advantages to that too.

 

[hot-gril]

There’s nothing really wrong about getting info back from recipients (except of course location info). I work for a company that organize big events and mail receipt notification is one of the things we look into. Whether they open our emails or not help us decide if we need to send another confirmation email to them.

Spammers use this to check whether people are engaging with their spam. I don't even care about my online privacy, I just don't want spam!

 

[jk1221]

Disabling loading remote content by default is the best way to deal with this. I hardly ever need to load remote content in an email.

I second that and how I have done it.

It also appears if you turn off mail protection, you can both hide IP and block remote images. Both toggles exist.

So does that mean if you do click say a store ad and load the images, then you get the same protections mail privacy gives?

I wish there was more specific documentation about the various differences/toggles to make a better informed decision.

I have no issue leaving images off, been doing it for years just fine. If there is some store ad (rarely want to see regularly anyway as if Im shopping Im already seeking it out online) I can go to their app or site and see it too really. Im way more concerned about the targeted complete spam than store ads from stores I signed up for that.

And yes, I do get the flood them with BS open data concept but that will be early 2022 before its on enough devices to start mattering.

 

[jk1221]

It’s annoying for apple mail to have all these great privacy features but lacking basic features that all other mail client have, like send later mail, giving a distinct color for each account connected or customizable notifications. I want Spark features with Apple privacy policy

Mail was really a big miss this year; basically zero actual app changes. And its been a few years. I was expecting at least a few changes; I see literally nothing yet other than these privacy things in settings which really isnt a change to the app.

Considering all the remote work stuff addressed, that was surprising that email is not considered a remote work feature. And there is certainly a TON missing from it still; sheer basics like color coding the inbox messages to know what account they go with if you use more than 1.

And they could easily do on-device snooze and send later. Send later is just literally a timer and, oh hey, send that through the mail servers now. That would have been impressive to achieve on-device.

A huge miss to catch up in email.

 

[9927036]

It’s annoying for apple mail to have all these great privacy features but lacking basic features that all other mail client have, like send later mail, giving a distinct color for each account connected or customizable notifications. I want Spark features with Apple privacy policy

Just use a VPN.