Back in June, we initially reported about the upcoming changes in iOS 15. Since that time, there has been a lot of discussion, articles and webbseminarier about the topic.  

There’s no doubt the iOS 15 Mail Integritet Protection changes are significant and will have a direct impact on how marketers track the success of their email programs. When faced with such a drastic and sudden change, it’s only natural to try and seek out ways that will keep or rationalize the status quo.  

Nedan följer fyra insikter om de mer nyanserade och inte omedelbart uppenbara effekterna av iOS 15-förändringarna.

1. Konsekvenserna sträcker sig längre än till e-postkonton på iCloud.com

Mail Integritet Protection will impact any email account that is set up within the Apple Mail.app in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, or MacOS Monterey. Generally, we expect this to impact 30-40% of a recipient’s user list. 

2. Användare behöver inte aktivt använda Mail.App för e-post för att påverkas av integritetsskyddet för e-post

Let’s consider a common scenario: a user sets up their email account in Apple Mail.app, Gmail’s App, and also routinely makes use of the Gmail Web App. Even if the user rarely (or never) opens their email in Apple Mail.app, Mail Integritet Protection will still pre-load images because the email account was set up in Apple’s Mail.app. In this case, a sender will see opens from Apple’s image proxy and Gmail’s image proxy.  

3. Regelbunden övervakning av ändringar i User-Agent-strängen

Per Google, a browser’s user-agent string helps identify which browser is being used, what version, and on which operating system. Currently, the user-agent string that Apple’s proxy servers are sending when requesting images is Mozilla/5.0. While there is no direct indication that this belongs to Apple’s image proxies, our testing indicates that the string gör accurately identify requests coming from Apple’s image proxies. This, in turn, may allow senders to filter out Apple proxy opens from their metrics or segment them differently. It is unknown whether Apple will change this in the future. As such, it will be important for senders to monitor for changes to this string and to adjust accordingly.

4. Förlita dig inte på tekniska knep eller lösningar

History has shown us that any technical workarounds to bypassing privacy-related functionality are often short-lived, harms your reputation, and are quickly closed. Even though early testing indicates there are some workarounds to Apple’s preloading of images, we believe senders should not rely upon or use these workarounds. 

Följande begränsningar i Mail Integritet Protection har observerats i tidiga betatester:

• Förladdning sker främst när användaren är på wifi och när den är inkopplad.
  Early testing indicates that preloading only happens when the user is on wifi and their phone is plugged into power. This behavior is a little unexpected and will be interesting to observe as Apple moves to General Availability for iOS15. In practice, what this means is that the open events are even more random than initially thought. It seems open events can occur when the user actually opens the message, or when the user hasn’t opened the message but is on wifi and the phone is charging – or some other combination of events that Apple decides. All of this points till same conclusion: open tracking on Apple devices can’t be trusted.

• Användarinitierade öppna händelser utlöses när bilden laddas via extern CSS.
  Testing also indicates that user-initiated open events are triggered when the image is loaded via an external CSS file. While on the surface this might seem like good news, we strongly recommend against using this approach. It’s extremely likely that Apple, like HEY already did, will close this loophole. (Läs Twitter-tråden.)

Men det finns ett mer grundläggande skäl till att inte använda detta tillvägagångssätt: användare som har valt Mail Integritet Protection har uttryckligen sagt att de inte vill att leverantörer spårar dem via e-postöppningar. Att använda den här typen av lösningar sviker användarnas förtroende, är dålig praxis och skadar i slutändan ditt varumärkes rykte.

Change is inevitable. And with change, comes uncertainty.  

Det är viktigt att komma ihåg att det slutgiltiga målet aldrig var att spåra öppningar - utan istället att nå vår målgrupp genom att skicka e-post som mottagarna vill interagera med. Så länge avsändarna har detta som sin ledstjärna kommer vi alla att anpassa oss för att hitta nya användar- och integritetscentrerade sätt att mäta resultaten.

~Chris Adams
Distinguished Engineer 

Med hjälp av drömteamet: George Schlossnagle, April Mullen, Elliot Ross och Koertni Adams