Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) is a feature of Apple's Mail app that downloads the images in an email in the background right after delivery, so the email looks opened even if the recipient never saw it. On top of that, the sender does not learn the real time of opening, the IP address or the location of the recipient. The feature has been running since autumn 2021 and, according to Litmus, affects roughly 55 to 60% of all email opens. Without a filter for automatic opens, the open rate, the share of recipients who opened the email, therefore comes out higher than reality. Quanda recognises automatic opens and leaves more than 80% of them out, and MPP does not affect clicks at all. Below you will find how MPP works, who it affects, what it changes in your statistics and how to work with open rates in 2026.
Key takeaways
- MPP downloads the images in an email, including the tracking pixel, right after delivery, regardless of whether the recipient opens the email.
- According to Litmus, Apple accounts for 62.26% of all opens (July 2026), and MPP affects roughly 55 to 60% of opens.
- According to Litmus, Gmail accounts for 27.03% of opens and Outlook for 5.83%. MPP does not affect people who read mail in their apps.
- MPP does not change clicks, unsubscribes, bounced emails or spam complaints.
- Since 2021 Quanda has filtered out more than 80% of automatic opens, including in automations and contact filters.
- Measure campaign success by clicks and pick the winner of a content A/B test by clicks.
In brief: what it is, since when, who it affects and what changes
- What it is: privacy protection in Apple's Mail app that hides opens, the time of opening, the IP address and the location of the recipient.
- Since when: since autumn 2021 (iOS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey) and in all later versions.
- Who it affects: recipients who read their mail in the Mail app on Apple devices or on the iCloud.com website and have the protection switched on, regardless of who provides their mailbox.
- What changes: the open rate without a filter goes up, the time and place of opening are not real, and A/B tests and automations based on opens need attention.
What has changed since the article was published: The article was first published in Czech in August 2021 under the title The end of open tracking in Apple Mail is approaching, before the feature launched. It estimated how MPP would show up and expected the open rate to rise by about 6%. In October 2026 we rewrote it based on how MPP actually works. We added a description of how it works based on Apple's documentation, Apple's current share of opens according to Litmus, an overview of the impact on individual metrics and a guide to reading statistics today. We dropped the charts of device share from 2019 to 2021 because they no longer apply. Since 2021 Quanda has filtered automatic opens.
What Apple Mail Privacy Protection is
Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) is a feature of Apple's Mail app that prevents senders from finding out how a recipient handles an email. According to Apple, it hides from the sender whether and when the recipient opened the email, how many times they opened it and what IP address they have, from which their location could be derived.
Apple introduced the feature on 7 June 2021 at its WWDC conference and launched it in autumn 2021 with iOS 15, iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey. It is switched on in the Mail app with the Protect Mail Activity option, and it is always the recipient who decides. The sender cannot influence it in any way and does not even learn whether a particular recipient uses it.
How MPP works and why it creates automatic opens
MPP downloads the images in an email, including the tracking pixel, right after delivery, so the sender records an open that was not made by a person.
An email open is measured with a tiny invisible image, the so-called tracking pixel. When the recipient displays the email, their mail app downloads the image from the sender's server, which records who opened the email, when and from where.
Mail Privacy Protection turns this principle around. According to Apple, the Mail app downloads images and other remote content in the background as soon as the email arrives, regardless of whether the recipient does anything with it. It also downloads the content through two separate servers run by different companies: the first knows the recipient's IP address but not the content of the email, the second knows the content but not the IP address, and passes on to the sender only a general location within a region. The result is an automatic open, that is an open created not by a person but by the mail app.
| What the sender sees | Without MPP | With MPP switched on |
|---|---|---|
| Email open | when the recipient displays the email | right after delivery, even if the recipient does not display it |
| Time of opening | the real time of display | the time Apple downloaded the content |
| Number of opens | every display | usually a single download |
| IP address and location | the recipient's address and approximate location | an Apple server address, only a general region |
| Click on a link | when the recipient clicks | unchanged, when the recipient clicks |
Source: Apple, Mail Privacy Protection & Privacy and the guide Use Mail Privacy Protection on iPhone (2025).
According to Apple, the protection does not apply to links or attachments. A click therefore still only happens when the recipient really clicks a link.
We believe the best solution will be to rely mainly on click data to track the performance and effectiveness of email campaigns.
Jan SpáčilCEO QuandaWho Mail Privacy Protection affects
MPP affects recipients who read their mail in Apple's Mail app on an iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple Vision Pro, and users of mail on the iCloud.com website. It does not matter who provides their mailbox: when a recipient adds a Gmail, Yahoo or corporate mail account to the Mail app, the protection applies to it as well. Conversely, anyone who reads mail in the Gmail or Outlook app on an iPhone is not affected by MPP.
According to Litmus, Apple accounted for 62.26% of all email opens in July 2026, Gmail for 27.03% and desktop Outlook for 5.83%. Litmus also states that MPP affects roughly 55 to 60% of all opens. The data comes from more than a billion opens measured with Litmus Email Analytics.
Source: Litmus, Email Client Market Share, July 2026.
The actual share in your database may differ considerably. Business recipients more often read mail in Outlook, consumers on an iPhone. The more iPhone and Mac users you have in your database, the more automatic opens your campaigns receive.
What MPP changes in email campaign statistics
MPP mainly changes the open rate and other metrics that are based on opens. The other statistics remain reliable.
| Metric | What MPP changes | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Open rate | without a filter it comes out higher than reality | track the trend across your own campaigns |
| Time of opening | shows the time of download, not of reading | do not tune send time by opens alone |
| Location and device | location is only general, device unknown | do not rely on them for segmentation |
| A/B test by opens | the share of Apple users in the groups can distort the result | evaluate content tests by clicks |
| Automation by opens | without a filter, an automatic open can trigger the next step | for key scenarios consider a click condition |
| Inactive contacts | without a filter, a contact can look active even if they do not read your emails | track opens and clicks over 12 months |
| Clicks, unsubscribes, bounces, spam | unchanged | keep tracking them as before |
The click-to-open rate (CTOR) is calculated from opened emails, so automatic opens affect it too: the more opens there are, the lower the CTOR. The click-through rate based on delivered emails remains unchanged. How to calculate it and what is normal is explained in the article Email click-through rate: 8 mistakes that lower it.
How Quanda filters automatic opens
Since 2021, that is since MPP arrived, Quanda has read the data of every open. When it recognises an automatic or bot open, it leaves it out of the campaign statistics, automation conditions and contact filters. In this way it filters out more than 80% of automatic opens. The filter works automatically in all plans, there is nothing to switch on or set up. Besides Apple Mail, it also recognises automatic opens from Gmail and from corporate mail security filters. We do not publish the exact detection method.
In practice this means three things:
- Statistics: Opened in total and Opened uniquely in the campaign statistics are already cleaned of recognised automatic opens. The meaning of the individual numbers is described in the help article What the terms in statistics mean.
- Automations: the opened and not opened conditions in automations of a simple campaign work with filtered opens. A reminder to those who did not open the email therefore also reaches recipients for whom only Apple Mail opened it.
- Contact scoring: contact scoring by open rate only counts opens that Quanda did not assess as automatic.
The open rate in Quanda is therefore a fairly accurate figure and shows the trend over time well. Only the smaller share of automatic opens that the filter does not recognise can still distort it. How to read the numbers in your statistics and which values are common today is described in the article Email open rate: is 20 % a lot or a little?
Tip: Quanda does not filter automatic clicks. With business recipients, some clicks may be created by a mail security filter that checks links right after delivery. You can recognise it when one recipient clicks all the links within a few seconds.
How to read email statistics after Apple Mail Privacy Protection
Read your statistics after MPP in six steps: track the trend, measure success by clicks, pick the A/B test winner by clicks, review your automations, identify inactive contacts over a longer period and measure what happens after the click.
Step 1: Track the trend, not a single number
Compare your open rate with your own previous campaigns to the same group of contacts, not with averages from other tools.
Published averages also differ depending on how each tool handles automatic opens, so there is no point in comparing them directly with numbers from Quanda. If your database does not change much, the share of Apple users in it stays similar, and the trend in your open rate shows well whether your subject lines and sender attract more or less interest.
Step 2: Measure campaign success by clicks
Use the click-through rate from delivered emails, which MPP does not affect, as the main measure of campaign success.
The click-through rate is the share of recipients who clicked at least one link in the email, out of the number of delivered emails. Unlike opens, mail apps do not create it on their own, so it shows real interest better. How to increase it is described in the article Email click-through rate: 8 mistakes that lower it.
Step 3: Pick the A/B test winner by clicks
When testing email content, set the winner to be picked by the higher percentage of total unique clicks, and keep opens for subject line tests only.
In an A/B testing campaign in Quanda you can pick the winner by the higher percentage of opened emails, of total unique clicks or of clicks on the selected URL. When you test the subject line or the sender, opens are the right criterion, because those are what decide whether an email gets opened. When you test the content, a button or an offer, pick by clicks. The procedure is described in the help article Setting up mailing in an A/B testing campaign.
How big a difference this makes is shown by our A/B testing campaign from February 2020. Both versions had the same subject line. Version B was opened by 27.8% of recipients and version A by 26.3%, but version A had a click-through rate of 3.6% and version B only 2.1%. Version A won. By opens, the version people clicked less would have won.
Step 4: Review automations with an open condition
For automations that send another email based on an open, consider whether a condition of clicking a specific link would be more accurate.
Quanda leaves automatic opens out of automation conditions, so a "did not open the email" reminder works. In scenarios where accuracy matters most, for example when a salesperson calls after an offer is opened, a click on a specific link is a more reliable signal of interest. You will find example scenarios in the article Email automation: 8 scenarios that work for you.
Step 5: Identify inactive contacts over a longer period
Select inactive contacts by opens and clicks over the last 12 months, not by a single campaign.
A contact who does not read or click your emails over the long term damages your sender reputation. Contact scoring in Quanda sorts contacts into segments by average open rate, and you can exclude the Ghosts segment, with a zero open rate, from your regular mailings. How to work with inactive contacts is described in the article What spam is and 4 rules to keep emails out of spam.
Step 6: Measure what happens after the click
Switch on the Google Analytics tracking code for your links and evaluate enquiries, orders and sign-ups coming from email.
Quanda adjusts the links in your email so that Google Analytics attributes the visits to the campaign. In Google Analytics 4 you then mark key events, such as an enquiry being sent or a purchase. The procedure is in the help article Tracking clicks with Google Analytics.
Watch out: Do not try to bypass MPP, for example with hidden links or image tricks. Apple downloads content through two separate servers, so you will not find out the real open anyway, and bypassing privacy protection damages recipients' trust.
What Apple Mail Privacy Protection does not change
MPP only changes what the sender knows about opens. Delivery of the email to the inbox, clicks, unsubscribes, bounced addresses and spam complaints do not change. Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook.com still assess senders by complaint rate and the technical setup of the domain, not by opens. What they require today is summarised in the article Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook requirements for bulk email senders.
Apple also offers iCloud+ subscribers the Hide My Email feature, which creates random addresses that forward mail to the real mailbox. It is not related to MPP, except that someone may subscribe with an address that does not look like their name.
Checklist: email statistics after MPP
After every campaign, check the open rate trend, clicks, the A/B test criterion, automations and inactive contacts.
- I compare my open rate with my own previous campaigns, not with other people's averages.
- The click-through rate is the main measure of campaign success.
- I evaluate content A/B tests by clicks and subject line tests by opens.
- Key automations have a click condition where that is more accurate.
- I identify inactive contacts by opens and clicks over 12 months.
- The Google Analytics tracking code is switched on for my links.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection: summary
Apple Mail Privacy Protection downloads email content right after delivery, so without a filter most emails to the Mail app look opened. Since 2021 Quanda has filtered out more than 80% of automatic opens, so its open rate shows the trend over time well. Still, measure the success of your campaigns mainly by clicks and conversions, which MPP does not affect.
You can learn how to read campaign statistics and what to conclude from them in the free online course Campaign statistics: measure what works. And if you are not sure what to make of the numbers in your campaigns, get in touch, we will be happy to take a look at them.
