The iOS 15 beta walkthrough for email marketers

If you want to know how the iOS 15 update will look without wanting to take the plunge and update with the beta version, no worries. We’ve got you covered.

We’ll give you a screen-by-screen walkthrough of the biggest changes in iOS 15 so can understand what options your Apple recipients will have when iOS 15 is released this fall. This new update includes the Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) and Hide My Email features.

Mail Privacy Protection

Immediately when you open the Mail app, you are presented with a popup asking you to turn on MPP:

(The way it’s being communicated to users, it seems pretty clear that most will choose “Protect Mail activity.”)

If you click on “Learn more” you’ll get the following notice explaining what Mail Privacy Protection is:

When MPP is turned on, open data tracking will be rendered useless for marketers, since Apple will purportedly show roughly 100% open rate for all Apple Mail recipients. This “proxy open” being done by Apple Mail will negatively impact any email marketer’s ability to accurately gauge recipient behavior.

Further, it will hide the recipient’s true IP address, which will also impact any IP-based workflows or segmentations for marketers.

When you go to Settings > Mail > Privacy Protection, you are met with this screen:

When users click on the toggle to disable MPP, it doesn’t disable it by default. It only turns off the “proxy open” feature (here it’s called “Block All Remote Content”), but the “Hide IP address” feature will still be on:

Only when both toggles are turned off is when MPP is technically disabled. (We say “technically” because when we tested this with iOS 15 beta, it still showed false open rate data.)

The fact that turning MPP on is one click and turning it off requires three clicks would suggest that most Apple users will have MPP turned on.

Hide My Email

Another feature that may cause some wrinkles for email marketers is the temp emails that iOS 15 will offer its users. Currently, disposable temporary email solutions (like temp-mail.org) exist, but it’s rather niche and can be difficult to use. When you close the temp-mail window, or clear cache, you lose the ability to access that email address (or even worse, forget what the email address was).

Apple’s Hide My Email will make it much easier for people to use temporary emails, which can lead to higher adoption rates.

Zach Moss, an engineer and self-proclaimed email geek, took the time to check out how the new Hide My Email feature works.

Whenever you are browsing a website and you need to fill in an email address (such as an exit-intent popup or at checkout), you’ll see the option to “Hide My Email” in the keyboard shortcut bar.

If you tap on that prompt, you’ll see a screen that automatically generates a new email address, and assigns it specifically to the domain that asked for the email address.

Afterwards, whenever you are on that website, that temporary email address will be available on the autofill keyboard bar:

Apple also notifies the user about the new email address generated for the specified domain:

While the Hide My Email feature is very easy to use, it still is something that actively needs to be done on a domain-by-domain basis.

After some novelty has worn off, the users may not stick with it if no clear benefits are seen (one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to clearly communicate the benefits of increased privacy).

We don’t believe that this will have a noticeable impact on email marketing, but that remains to be seen.