While this won’t affect all users, it will change the way we (as an emails sender) approach our lists and email kpis in general. The mail privacy protection features will: prevent senders from tracking whether an email has been opened prevent senders from learning what the recipient’s ip address was let users sign up for services with randomly created email addresses and keep their personal addresses private now, it’s not clear as to how apple will stop tracking pixels from being loaded.
It’s hard to imagine that they’ll be gambling data india able distinguish between the tracking pixel and regular images present in emails. The likely approach is that apple will preload images (and hide the ip address) for the recipients, similar to what gmail has implemented in the past. While this may not necessarily mean we’ll completely lose the ability to track opens, the opens will appear right after the message has been delivered and not when the recipient actually opens the message.
The rationale for why apple’s doing this? Privacy has become apple’s usp, a good reason to pay premium for otherwise not-so-unique-anymore products. At the same time, the conspiracy theory seekers might think that apple’s playing a long-term game, where they’ll let marketers target their users more accurately only if they pay for some additional services (for example, advertising space). Another screenshot example of hiding privacy information on an iphone. Hide my email lets users share unique, random email addresses that forward to their personal inbox anytime they wish to keep their personal email address private (image from apple press release).