Jika Anda seorang #emailgeek, Anda pasti sudah mendengar berita dari Apple minggu ini tentang perubahan besar yang akan berdampak pada email dalam hal pelacakan terbuka. Kami ingin membagikan apa yang kami ketahui dan sudut pandang kami saat ini, tetapi informasi ini akan berkembang seiring dengan pembelajaran kami. Kami akan terus memperbarui artikel ini dan membagikan konten baru dalam beberapa minggu dan bulan ke depan saat kami mempelajari lebih lanjut.

Apa yang terjadi?

Apple announced Mail Privasi Protection for their Mail app on iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey devices. Menurut Apple, “Mail Privasi Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. [It prevents] senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.”

Kapan hal ini terjadi?

Meskipun belum ada tanggal yang ditetapkan, namun diperkirakan akan diluncurkan paling cepat pada bulan September, namun kemungkinan paling lambat pada bulan November.

How will users control their Mail Privasi Protection via their iOS 15 Mail app? 

Di bawah ini adalah bagaimana fitur perlindungan privasi akan disajikan kepada semua pengguna iOS 15:

Image source: Ryan Jones on Twitter.

What are the resulting implications when “Protect Mail Activity” is selected by a user? 

Pengujian yang kami lakukan telah mengonfirmasi bahwa dalam beberapa kasus, Apple melakukan pramuat gambar dalam email, bahkan untuk email yang belum dibuka. Ini berarti hampir semua email yang dikirim ke penerima menggunakan Aplikasi Mail mungkin memiliki hasil yang tidak jelas yang menunjukkan pembukaan yang salah.

Does it matter if the user is on Gmail or some other mail service? 

Layanan email tidak penting di sini. Titik akhir di mana email dibuka adalah yang penting di sini. Jika email dibuka di aplikasi Mail di perangkat iOS 15, iPadOS 15, dan macOS Monterey, email tersebut akan memiliki opsi untuk tidak dilacak melalui pilihan privasi pengguna yang ditunjukkan pada gambar di atas.

Bagaimana jika pengguna memiliki iOS 15 dan menggunakan aplikasi Gmail?

Bukan hanya sistem operasi yang memungkinkan pelacakan ini. Ini hanya berlaku jika pengguna memiliki iOS 15 DAN memeriksa email mereka melalui aplikasi Apple Mail asli. Jika pengguna menggunakan Gmail atau aplikasi email lain yang bukan Apple Mail, meskipun di iOS 15, kontrol privasi tidak akan berlaku.

Sebagai pengirim email, apakah ini berarti saya tidak dapat melacak email yang dibuka oleh pengguna Apple Mail?

Kami berpikir bahwa banyak pengguna akan memilih untuk memilih opsi "Lindungi Aktivitas Email" ketika opsi ini disajikan kepada mereka. Kami berpikir bahwa pelaporan akan menggelembungkan jumlah pembukaan secara berlebihan karena Apple tampaknya memuat piksel pelacakan melalui relay atau proxy untuk pengguna yang telah memilih privasi. Pengujian kami telah mengonfirmasi bahwa dalam beberapa kasus, Apple melakukan pramuat gambar dalam email, bahkan untuk email yang belum dibuka.* Anda tidak akan bisa membedakan pembukaan palsu ini dengan pembukaan asli.

Bagaimana dengan klik? Apakah pelacakan terhadap hal tersebut akan terpengaruh?

In our testing, we’ve determined that when “iCloud Private Relay” (which will be a part of the new iCloud+ offering) is enabled all web browsing activities through Safari are encrypted and routed through beberapa server proxy.  One interesting point to note is that Private Relay (at, least on our test device) worked just as well over HTTP or HTTPS.  This behavior is different than some sites are reporting, but in multiple tests our actual IP address was masked over both HTTP and HTTPS sites.

Additionally, early testing indicates that Apple will not modify the querystring nor are they changing the user agent string. So, first-party click tracking will likely not be impacted by this feature.  

When configuring Private Relay, the user is presented with two options for protecting their location information. The user can choose to have an anonymous IP address that preserves the user’s approximate location or they can choose to have an IP address that will be located in a broader region.  In our testing, the IP address when choosing the first option was located in the metropolitan area that the test lived within, but not identifiable to their home neighborhood.  When choosing the broader region option, the IP address was in an entirely different state, but still in the same country.  Assuming this behavior remains the same in the future, sites will still be able to use the IP information to make privacy compliance, segmentations, and similar geographic/regional decisions. 

How many people use Apple’s Mail App? 

As the world’s largest email sender delivering 40% of the world’s commercial and transactional email, we have a fairly good view of the world’s email footprint. In our Laporan Tolok Ukur 2021, we saw 38.1% of all opens and clicks coming from one of the Apple Mail app clients, with 25.7% on iPhone, 9.6% on desktop and 2.8% on iPad. This is second only to Gmail (on mobile and desktop) as the largest market share of any device/client family.

Mengapa Apple melakukan ini?

Apple has long held the belief that privacy is a fundamental human right. It matches what a lot of governments in industrial nations across the world have been leaning into. This is something they are able to do as the owner of the distribution channel, and it’s a trend we’ve seen Apple follow with capping the IDFA tracking on other apps on the App Store, which telah mendapat perlawanan dari Facebook. Apple initiated these types of changes in email last year when they launched the Private Email Relay service which allows users to sign into apps with an anonymous, unique email address. With the release of iOS 14.5, when US-based users were prompted to authorize tracking by an app, 96% of the time they opted out of tracking, so we believe adoption of this new privacy feature will be extremely broad.  We’ve also seen the demise of cookie pihak ketiga in the advertising industry, including on Apple’s Safari. It was inevitable that Apple would lean into privacy on open tracking too. 

How much will this impact email senders? 

Opens are not a perfect metric, and it has always come with flaws. It does, however, tell you engagement trends over time. Some call it a vanity metric, which is a myopic view. The technology behind opens powers more than an engagement metric (even if that metric is flawed). It also makes a lot of the cool innovation in the email space possible, which is now up to question. 

Ada banyak hal yang harus dibongkar di sini, tetapi inilah yang kami pikirkan tentang dampaknya:

• Kurangnya kemampuan untuk menggunakan open sebagai bagian dari strategi kebersihan/segmentasi daftar. Without access to opens, senders will need to rely on clicks and deeper behaviors to know if a real human is still there and interested in the content to keep receiving it. Opens (and the lack-thereof) have long been an important leading indicator of user disengagement which promoted early removal/retargeting of disengaged users. Some senders might even fall into bad sending practices by not having this metric to use for segmentation. We suspect Q4 (and beyond) deliverability might be challenging for some senders that aren’t ready for this.

• Pengujian jalur subjek yang mengandalkan pelacakan terbuka akan cacat. This will no longer be an easy thing to test for Apple Mail users. Metrics like clicks and conversions that are further down the email conversion funnel from the subject line will have to be used. Companies that use Natural Language Processing to optimize subject lines will need to rethink their strategy in order to update the algorithms that support the effectiveness of their products when it comes to recipients using the Mail App. However, subject line testing that relies upon data from panel engagement, such as SparkPost subject line predict and subject line advisor, will continue to provide relevant insights and predictions.

• Pengoptimalan waktu kirim juga akan cacat because it often takes opens into account as part of its algorithm to determine the right time to send the email based on open and click engagement. We do believe that products like Verizon’s View Time Optimization will be unaffected by this.

• Personalisasi waktu terbuka/konten langsung akan rusak. We’ve seen cool innovation in recent years with weather widgets and store locators based on your location di time of open. Other innovations that will be impacted will be device trackers that detect the operating system to tell you to download the app via the App Store or Google Play. Countdown timers will probably not work due ke caching by Apple at mail inception. Anything that draws from context di time of open (location, time, device, etc) through open tracking is potentially at risk.

• Strategi data untuk undang-undang privasi khusus lokal (seperti GDPR) atau ketersediaan layanan perlu dipikirkan kembali if they use email opens or clicks from emails to establish recipient residency.

• Memantau penempatan inbox akan menjadi metrik yang lebih penting untuk dilacak because assuming your emails have landed in the inbox based on opens will no longer be reliable.

Bagaimana pengaruhnya terhadap produk yang saya gunakan di Bird?

We’re ready for this big industry change in our products. You can read more about it here.

Ini adalah pemikiran awal kami tentang apa artinya hal ini bagi komunitas email. Kami akan terus memberikan pembaruan dan berbagi konten tentang bagaimana Anda dapat bersiap-siap untuk perubahan ini yang akan hadir sebelum kita menyadarinya.