Email Privacy and The Frog in the Pot
Apple’s ‘Mail Privacy Protection’ decision for iOS 15 has started to show up in email statistics. I use the word ‘decision’, not feature; a feature is something you choose to use. As iPhone users start shifting to iOS 15, given the label and the OS prompt, it’s hard to argue that they’re being given an informed choice.
Email marketers and vendors started ringing bells and gnashing teeth in June, when the decision was announced. A handful, including Campaign Genius, have put together statistics about adoption since iOS 15 became publicly available in mid-September.
Stats vary with the samples, but generally it looks like MPP is hovering between 10% - 20% of email at this point.
Are email marketers breathing a sigh of relief? If so…they risk being the proverbial frog, blowing happy bubbles in a slowly heating pot.
Speaking as a technologist with some decades behind me…rolling out something huge is a process, not a light switch. Apple signed themselves up to cache around 50% of the world’s email images. There are over 300 billion email messages sent every day. That is, in a phrase, a helluva lot of pixels. It’s highly, highly likely that the rollout process is intentionally gradual. The water isn’t boiling, but it’s darn well heating up.
Shared on Twitter by Tom Kulzer of AWeber
Tom Kulzer, CEO at AWeber, has shared some detailed stats. “Looking at the percentage of opens that happen in any given hour for a 24h period, the trend becomes very clear. The overwhelming majority of opens are detected in the evening, not from human activity but from caching while your iPhone charges.”
I’m speculating a bit, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple’s carrier partners got to weigh in on MPP. (Not their email marketing team, obviously…) “Hey, uh, would you guys prioritize the middle of the night when people are likely to be on WiFi, instead of chewing up our bandwidth?” Or Apple’s partner(s) for network egress (Cloudflare and Fastly IPs have both been spotted) cut them a midnight-bandwidth deal. Or both.
That doesn’t mean that low take-up is permanent, or that midnight loads are permanent. These are the kind of things you do in a gradual rollout of a massive system.
I’d expect to see the pattern shift as iOS 15 updates — 15.1 or whatever — roll out. Since the MPP image load originates with the device, logic would suggest that the clock/calendar/etc for caching is set in the OS. Or (also possible), we’ll realize over time that MPP is more sophisticated, and that caching is affected by user behavior.
The main point is that the water will get hotter.
Will Apple eventually cache every image the instant emails hit the device? It doesn’t matter. The goal of “mail privacy” is achieved whether caching is arbitrary, network-loaded, user-tailored or something else.
The heat will go up noticeably when iOS 15 is pushed to devices as a recommended security update. It hasn’t been, yet, but based on history, it will. I’ve been using iOS 15 on my personal device (and a flock of test devices) since July. It’s great; I don’t see any big reasons for people to reject it. And iOS 15 is a valid upgrade for devices all the way back to iPhone 6s — that’s an iPhone from 2015, in case you’re curious.
If your email program matters to your business, start looking forward a few months. Whatever solution you choose, your implementation — like Apple’s — will take time. Campaign Genius offers a privacy-first solution for opens and open-rate measures now (Open Genius). If open measures and open rates affect your business, we’d be happy to help you out of the MPP stew. If you’ve got questions about MPP and opens, get in touch!
