Thread by @bsisolak

It’s been about 12 hours since @Apple announced Mail Privacy Protection and this looks like this might be a watershed moment for #emailmarketing. Besides just opens, there are several additional consequences … see thread… and add your own!

@Apple suggests they will preload all images on emails when marketing emails are sent – not opened. It’s day 1, so more testing is needed to confirm.

This is not some buried setting and is on by default, ~100% of iOS users will switch to this (based on the adoption rate for those who opted out of app tracking in iOS 14)

If you are an #emailgeeks using last open date for any segmentation or targeting, that cohort will grow to the point of being rendered useless.

If you like to run really quick subject line tests based on opens and quickly deploy a winner – that won’t work anymore as you will get flooded with a huge number phantom openers very fast. Your numerator will be unable to show differences as it will be artificially inflated.

If you use Send Time Optimization of any kind that data will now be highly inaccurate to the point of being rendered useless.

And this one is the one that hurts… countdown timers might show outdated times as the cached version was pulled at sent time, not opened time. (potential workaround is the providers of these services will have provide a different version to show to only iOS users)

Also, some smart @emailgeeks have wondered if some interactive emails that reference external CSS might not work as well.

This is all in beta....it's day 1...it's late... so things might change… and maybe @Apple has some workaround for some of these issues. as #emailgeeks dig into we will also come up with some smart workarounds.

Now I need sleep....

New one for the list, the iOS proxy will prevent getting client breakouts between iPhones, iPad and Apple Mail. This is in line with @gmail, @yahoomail and @Outlook proxies, so knowing your % of mobile vs. desktop openers seems like a thing of the past (more then it is already)