SparkPost Product Updates to Accommodate Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection

Partner ContentApple Mail Privacy Protections

As you have likely heard (and may be stressing about), Apple really rocked the email world when they announced in June that they were planning to anonymize open activity for their email users. Shortly after the announcement, we published a comprehensive blog post about what these changes mean. We also wrote about some of the lesser understood impacts. Lastly, we did an “Ask Me Anything” webinar to answer a lot of questions from the email community. We also promised to give an update on what we’re doing from a product standpoint to prepare for these changes.

Our Inbox Tracker and Competitive Tracker products don’t use open pixels to track opens, so those will continue to work as they always have. On the sending side, we will be adding a field to both Webhooks and the Events API to indicate when an open has been pre-fetched. These opens will still be included since they can be a valuable signal that an email address is valid (specifically, they indicate that the email address is linked to a powered-on Apple device, so almost certainly associated with a “real” human being). Nevertheless, the new flag will make it easy to see that these opens are different from actual engagement events and should be treated differently. This capability will be coming in a few weeks. We will also incorporate this distinction into our Analytics Report UI and Metrics API in Q4. 

We’ve reached out to some of you to get feedback on how to accommodate Apple’s changes, and we’re listening. If you are a SparkPost customer and you want to be a part of the feedback on these releases, please contact your account team. 

We know change can be scary, but adapting is a part of life. We hope that we have been able to make this change a bit easier and less intimidating to navigate. Good luck, and we’ll see you on the other side!