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 seminarios web about the topic.  

There’s no doubt the iOS 15 Mail Privacidad 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.  

A continuación se presentan cuatro ideas sobre los impactos más matizados y no inmediatamente obvios de los cambios de iOS 15.

1. El impacto va más allá de las cuentas de correo electrónico de iCloud.com

Mail Privacidad 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. No es necesario que los usuarios utilicen activamente Mail.App para que la protección de la privacidad del correo electrónico les afecte.

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 Privacidad 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. Supervise regularmente los cambios en la cadena User-Agent

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 hace 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. No dependa de trucos o soluciones técnicas

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. 

En las primeras pruebas beta se han observado las siguientes limitaciones de la Protección de la privacidad del correo:

• La precarga se produce principalmente cuando el usuario está en wifi y cuando está enchufado.
  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 a la same conclusion: open tracking on Apple devices can’t be trusted.

• Los eventos de apertura iniciados por el usuario se activan cuando la imagen se carga mediante CSS externo.
  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. (Lea el hilo de Twitter.)

Pero hay una razón más fundamental para no utilizar este enfoque: los usuarios que han optado por la Protección de Privacidad de Correo han dicho explícitamente que no quieren que los proveedores les rastreen a través de las aperturas de correo electrónico. Utilizar este tipo de soluciones traiciona la confianza del usuario, es una mala práctica y, en última instancia, daña la reputación de tu marca.

Change is inevitable. And with change, comes uncertainty.  

Es importante recordar que el objetivo final nunca ha sido hacer un seguimiento de las aperturas, sino llegar a nuestro público objetivo enviando correos electrónicos con los que los destinatarios quieran interactuar. Mientras los remitentes mantengan ese objetivo como su estrella del norte, todos nos adaptaremos juntos para encontrar nuevas formas de medir los resultados centradas en el usuario y la privacidad.

~Chris Adams
Distinguished Engineer 

Con la ayuda del dream team: George Schlossnagle, April Mullen, Elliot Ross y Koertni Adams