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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.
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