9to5Mac is brought to you by Incogni: A couple years ago, Apple introduced a new feature for Apple Mail users called Mail Privacy Protection.It isn’t on by default, though you might’ve seen a prompt to enable it upon launching the Mail app for the first time.That said, you might not know what it actually does.
We’ll be breaking down Mail Privacy Protection and its benefits right here.Overview In short, Mail Privacy Protection does one core thing: it passes your emails through an Apple proxy, rather than handling all of the fetching on your device.This feature is also available to all Apple users, and doesn’t require an iCloud+ subscription.
All of your email fetching being passed through an Apple proxy gives you two key privacy benefits: Senders can no longer see your exact IP address, instead they’ll see Apple’s – preventing any sort of potential location tracking Any sort remote content are cached beforehand, preventing senders from being able to know exactly when you may have engaged with their email There’s also a third non-privacy benefit: less delays when loading media in emails, since it already would’ve been cached.Why does it matter? Well, it matters because of a thing called tracking pixels.In short, they’re little tiny images that aren’t even visible in the email, though they do serve an important purpose.
Traditionally, when you’d open such an email, the tracking pixel would need to be fetched, thus notifying the sender of your IP address and the time of when you opened it.That does have some privacy concerns, since a rough idea of your location can be exposed.It also can lead to targeted follow up emails or additional spam, since the sender knows you engaged with the first one.
With Mail Privacy Protection turned on, the only IP addresses that get returned are going to be Apple’s.Additionally, all email content gets fetched in advance on a scheduled interval, which essentially means that every tracking pixel would show as “opened” without knowing exactly what you’ve engaged with.It’s certainly resulted in email publishers needing to figure out a new way to track engagement.
Should you use it? Ultimately, it’s a free feature that’s available to all Apple Mail app users, regardless of if they’re using iCloud Mail.Given the limits it places on email tracking, it feels like a no brainer.Even if the impact is relatively minimal, taking back just a little bit of your personal information can make more of a difference than you’d think.
If you want to check if Mail Privacy Protection is turned on, you can do it pretty easily.Open up the Settings app, scroll down to the Apps section, then find Mail.You should see a section called “Privacy Protection”, then inside of that section there should be a toggle called “Protect Mail Activity.” You’ll want to turn that on.
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