Now would Apple put the kibosh on this, too? Who knows! Once triggered, though these pixels are cached so you wouldn’t be able to detect subsequent actions. This means if you have pixels that detect interactive actions, they would detect real user actions. One very interesting note is that interactive or kinetic background images loaded through :hover or :checked are not pre-fetched by the client.

Interactive pixels can still gauge engagement:.

Update: Apparently you can detect a real user open as of iOS Beta 5 by using an external CSS pixel. Unfortunately, this makes it harder to tell if an email is actually read or not by tinkering with media queries. This is consistent with how the client would behave if an email is opened by a user. What I’ve found is that if you have desktop and mobile background images that are loaded using media queries, only the mobile background images are loaded. By the way, you can learn how to set up your own pixel here, so you can run your own experiments that way.Īlso, take the following observations with a grain of salt as this is only the beta and Apple can always tweak their setup at any time. I downloaded the iOS15 beta onto my device and set up my own pixel.

The following are some of the technical details I’ve discovered while testing the Apple Mail app on iOS15 beta. This is not a default setting but something that a user will see when they first open an Apple Mail app, in which they’ll get a message prompting them to either “Protect Mail activity” or “Don’t protect Mail activity.” The new feature helps users prevent 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.” According to Apple’s press release, “Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. On June 7, during Apple’s WWDC21 conference, it announced Mail Privacy Protection for their Mail app on iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey devices, set to launch between September and November of this year.

By now the topic of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection change for the upcoming iOS 15 is on everyone’s lips.

Apple mail download headers only