About Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP)

Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) downloads incoming emails to Apple servers, which makes it look like emails were opened by recipients. This could falsely inflate your email opens and open-related metrics.

In this article, you'll learn about Apple MPP, how it impacts your opens and open-related metrics, and how to exclude Apple MPP opens from your Mailchimp reports.

Things to know

Here are some things to know.

• Metrics impacted by Apple MPP are opens, open rates, unique opens, clicks per unique opens, and total opens.
• Mailchimp can tell which emails were opened by Apple MPP and which were not. You can exclude the open-related metrics impacted by Apple MPP from your reports for emails sent on or after June 22, 2024.
• Apple MPP can be used by anyone who has an Apple device and has their email set up on the Apple Mail app.
• Opens and open-related metrics don’t apply to SMS.

How it works

The Apple MPP policy for email was released September 21, 2021 with the iOS 15 operating system. Customers are automatically opted-in with any MPP-supported Apple device. With this release, Apple downloads incoming emails on its own server. This makes it appear as if the recipient has opened the email, which inflates your open-related metrics.

Mailchimp email opens are tracked by tiny image pixels embedded in email content. When a recipient opens an email it downloads that image and registers as “email open.” This means that anyone using Apple MPP will be marked as having opened all of their emails, even if they never actually looked at the message.

Mailchimp can tell which emails were opened by Apple MPP, and which were not. For emails sent on or after June 22, 2024, you can exclude the open-related metrics from your reports that were impacted by Apple MPP for more accuracy.

Exclude Apple MPP

Exclude emails opened by Apple MPP from your marketing dashboard to get a better idea of how many emails were actually opened by your recipients.

Marketing dashboard

Check the Exclude Apple MPP for more accurate open data box to exclude the emails opened by Apple MPP. We’ll display an Excluded or Included Apple MPP status in sections with open-related metrics.

For more information, read About the Marketing Dashboard.

Next steps

To learn more about opens and open rates, check out About Open and Click Rates and Use Open Tracking in Emails.