Salesforce Inbox Email Tracking and Apple Privacy Policy

What This Change Means for Inbox Users

After the rollout, you’ll likely see inflated open rates for emails. The impact varies depending on a number of factors. For example, whether there’s significant usage of Apple Mail among your prospects and customers. 

With this change, nearly all emails managed by Apple Mail are automatically marked as opened even if the recipient doesn’t click on them. This includes recipients who have non-Apple email addresses such as Gmail, when used with Apple Mail.

Sales reps use email opens to tailor their sales approach — timing their engagements with interested prospects and customers. MPP will cause all email content to automatically load when it’s delivered to the Apple Mail client — making it appear as if the recipient opened every email. Email open metrics will no longer be reliable to track engagement.

Inbox users can continue to take advantage of link clicks tracking. Tracking link clinks isn't affected by this change.
 

Who's Affected

Email recipients opening email in Apple Mail clients on Apple devices on iOS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, and watchOS 8. (Note: this does not impact non-Apple Mail app users such as Gmail or Yahoo mail app emails). According to Litmus, Apple Mail accounts for 49.7% of all email opens.
 

How the Privacy Setting Works

When the Apple setting Protect Mail activity is on, Apple routes emails through a proxy server to pre-load message content—including tracking pixels—before serving the email to the user. Even if the user doesn’t actually open those emails.

Here's how it works:
1. When a user opens the Apple Mail app, all email is downloaded to their Apple device from their email provider (e.g., Yahoo or Google).

2. At certain intervals (could be immediately or could be a couple days later), Apple downloads and copies the images in the email to a new location in the Apple Privacy Cache. The download is triggered by a proxy server with an Apple-provided IP address assigned to the general region of the subscriber, to mask the recipient’s geolocation. This caching process activates the email open tracking pixel which makes the email provider think the email has been opened.

3. If the recipient actually opens the email, Apple serves the image directly.  So, the sender doesn’t see the real open.

As an email sender, you can’t tell who opened your emails or when/if the recipient opened the email using Apple Mail.
 

More Information