24 ms·

Will Apple Mail threaten the newsletter boom?

• symfoniq 5y ago
  Unless I'm misunderstanding how this new feature is implemented, tracking pixels will still work, but the data that can be gleaned from them will be more generic (the IP address will belong to a proxy). Senders that are using these pixels to measure engagement (as opposed to building user profiles) shouldn't have much to worry about.
  • iancarroll 5y ago
    "Mail Privacy Protection works by hiding your IP address and loading remote content privately in the background, even when you don't open the message."
    • taylorfinley 5y ago
      Does this give Apple an excuse to send the content of received emails to their servers, for the background proxy loading process? "Even when you don't open the message" is very creepy to me. I'm suspicious of any company that wants to read my emails to 'protect' my privacy.
      • symfoniq 5y ago
        Not necessarily. Tracking pixels are implemented using images (usually transparent ones), so all Apple Mail needs to do is send the image URLs to the proxies, not the entire contents of the email. What they're actually doing remains to be seen.
      • crooked-v 5y ago
        The simplest implementation here would probably be something where the server pulls a copy of images and then bundles them into an inline blob in the IMAP email storage. They're "reading your emails" for functionality like spam filtering anyway. This seems like it would work on basically the same level as that kind of stuff.
        • warkdarrior 5y ago
          > They're "reading your emails" for functionality like spam filtering anyway. This seems like it would work on basically the same level as that kind of stuff. This is how Gmail started as well, and now Gmail is a big source of profiling info for Google advertising.
        • lxgr 5y ago
          > They're "reading your emails" for functionality like spam filtering anyway. Except for iCloud addresses, I'm pretty sure that that's not true for Apple Mail.
        • snowwrestler 5y ago
          For most people using iPhones, Apple is not providing the server. On most iPhones the Mail app is hooked up to Gmail, company email, etc. So it will be interesting to see how Apple inserts itself into that setup to implement the image proxy.
      • snowwrestler 5y ago
        This is a great question. A lot of orgs issue iPhones and hook them up to “on-prem” corporate email servers that they own and operate. They would NOT be happy to find out that all their email copies are suddenly being copied to Apple.
• AlexandrB 5y ago
  Betteridge's law of headlines applies to this one. Though this quote from another article was particularly inexplicable to me: > “This is another sign that Apple’s war against targeted advertising isn’t just about screwing Facebook,” Joshua Benton wrote in Nieman Lab. “They’re also coming for your Substack.” Substack's whole appeal (at least to me) is that it's not bogged down by the seemingly mandatory ads, popovers, and autoplay videos that plague every other news site.
  • dylan604 5y ago
    Why is it that Apple is coming for anyone specific rather than just trying to protect user privacy in general regardless to who it is affecting? Of course, other than not being click-baity enough.
    • AlexandrB 5y ago
      Reading some of the takes on this topic makes me realize that my consent is completely irrelevant to this whole industry at this point: https://mattietk.medium.com/apples-mail-privacy-protection-is-lazy-and-hurts-small-publishers-79e1972aab46 https://mattietk.medium.com/apples-mail-privacy-protection-i... > Apple’s fight for privacy is really a fight against the web. In signing up for a newsletter, a publisher or marketer already has a more valuable piece of PII: your email address. By focusing on IP addresses, and blocking trackers rather than proxying them on a fuzzy delay (which would provide the same useful publisher data without any PII leak of location or time), Apple are not really fighting for their users so much as they are fighting against email. No. Embedding invisible elements that report back information I never intended you to have is "fighting against email". Terrestrial mail does not allow you to track where, when, or by whom it's opened. I think that's the expectation of most people for email as well. The fact that marketers have gotten away with something different thus far is a vulnerability in the standard as far as I'm concerned and should be fixed.
  • stonogo 5y ago
    Substack's value prop is that subscribers receive richly-formatted emails of the posts; it's essentially a newsletter service with a web publishing feature.
• villasv 5y ago
  TL;DR: No Needle in the haystack: > But after conversations with newsletter writers and media executives today, I’m not sure that people doing email-based journalism have all that much to worry about from the shift.
• midasuni 5y ago
  I’m confused. When I open a mail in iOS, I get a banner saying “this message contains unloaded images” I thought the only ones loaded were ones embedded as an attachment. Is that not the case?
  • symfoniq 5y ago
    You're not wrong. Not loading images will block tracking pixels completely. Apple is just adding a way to send less PII while still loading images.
    • midasuni 5y ago
      I rarely want images on my mails. Won’t this method show that I access my mail on an Apple device - this leaking information that might not be leaked otherwise?
      • symfoniq 5y ago
        Leaked to who, though? If you use this feature, then sure, Apple will know that you're using an Apple device. But the purpose of the proxy is to shield the end-user's IP address, and probably their user agent, too. Some email providers already do this. If you load an image from a Yahoo mailbox, for example, the reported user agent is "YahooMailProxy; https://help.yahoo.com/kb/yahoo-mail-proxy-SLN28749.html https://help.yahoo.com/kb/yahoo-mail-proxy-SLN28749.html".
        • midasuni 5y ago
          Send a mail to bob@bob.com with an image of eztrack.com/bob123.jpg If it’s loaded from an Apple ip you know Bob has an Apple device.
          • symfoniq 5y ago
            I see your point. If you're the kind of user who keeps automatic image download disabled, and rarely downloads them manually, keeping Mail Privacy Protection disabled might actually be more private. Fortunately, it isn't automatic. You'll have to enable it. But if you do download a tracking pixel, email marketers already know you are using an Apple device. I see the Mail Privacy Protection feature as being primarily for people who want to automatically download images while sending less PII.
• toxik 5y ago
  Difficult to feel pity for business models built on abusing HTML capabilities to track email viewing. I don’t load remote images by default, so this already doesn’t work for me. However, basically every mail platform creates tailored links to track click engagement. So you’re screwed anyway, just maybe a little later.
  • techsupporter 5y ago
    > However, basically every mail platform creates tailored links to track click engagement. Yep, even financial institutions do this and half of them don’t even use domains they own for the tracking links. Years and years of “don’t click on suspicious links” out the window because bank.example.com/creditcard is turned into 4828fjfneo848.totallyfine.adtracker.thirdparty.example.org I hate all of it but nobody seems to give a shit (nor do they care to implement proper 2FA to effectively guard against phishing) so whatever. If people have their accounts drained because marketers gotta get that sweet engagement metric, what does it matter any more?
    • kergonath 5y ago
      > I hate all of it but nobody seems to give a shit I hope this will change. More companies need to make some noise about it.
    • lttlrck 5y ago
      A pet peeve is unsubscribe links are frequently on an obscure domain that has found it's way onto Adblock lists. That's got be by design.
      • wlesieutre 5y ago
        If something makes itself difficult to unsubscribe you could always feed it to the spam filter
        • bentcorner 5y ago
          When I unsubscribe from a mailing list I know I didn't sign up for, I'll also hit the report spam button in the hopes it gives them some negative gmail juju.
• seumars 5y ago
  Every privacy-focused push by Apple – or anyone, really – forces publishers to find less invasive methods for engaging with their audience, without having to rely on skewed data and grotesque tracking. How could that be bad for journalism? We got rid of blinking text and popup ads for a reason, and this is just the next step.
  • layble 5y ago
    Exactly the opposite actually.
    • midasuni 5y ago
      Please elaborate
      • throwaway3699 5y ago
        It forces publishers into closed gardens. I am willing to bet Apple's work here will have the same effect that advertising did on RSS, which is that newsletters will turn into truncated notifications designed to bring you to a website where they can get the business metrics they "think" they need. I actually think there is a nice middle ground for something like a basic view counter, and some open rate data to be available in an aggregated, anonymous way.
  • Barrin92 5y ago
    because one possible consequence of this is that it forces people to move towards closed platforms like Apple's own if they want to effectively advertise and that includes forking over substantial amount of money to those platforms. Which is of course the economic incentive that a company like Apple has to introduce these measures, it creates an asymmetry where Apple has all kinds of user information, but competitors don't. And if you want to see the effect that declining ad revenue has on journalism you can just look at the decline of local journalism across the US as revenue shifted from advertisers to digital platforms.
    • 5y ago
• jedberg 5y ago
  Doesn't Gmail and Outlook already anonymize tracking pixels? When I heard that announcement what I heard was, "we implemented a feature that Gmail and Outlook have had for years!". I don't think it will change the landscape all that much.
  • stingraycharles 5y ago
    They don’t anonimize it, they just request it from the backend. They still request the exact same URL, so you can carefully track email opens on a person-by-person basis, you just cannot track IP addresses and/or set tracking cookies or whatnot.
    • jankeymeulen 5y ago
      Will Apple do it differently?
    • jedberg 5y ago
      Right, exactly the same way Apple Mail will work.
      • JimDabell 5y ago
        No, you’re missing the difference. Gmail requests the embedded resources when you open the email. So it’s still possible to track open rates through it, even if the proxy obscures your IP address. Apple Mail requests the embedded resources without you opening the email, so you cannot use it for tracking open rates. A lot of people assumed this is what Gmail did, but it wasn’t actually the case.
    • gruez 5y ago
      The wording[1] also suggests they request the images even if you haven't opened the email, which obfuscates whether you've opened the email or not. With other services like gmail the images are only requested when you open the email, so it's possible to infer whether you opened the email or not based on whether the image was loaded. [1] https://twitter.com/rjonesy/status/1401993816001978375/photo/1 https://twitter.com/rjonesy/status/1401993816001978375/photo...
• Animats 5y ago
  I've had image loading turned off in Thunderbird for a decade or more.
  • midasuni 5y ago
    I don’t think I’ve ever had a mail client that loads images by default. Maybe Eudora in the late 90s? I have a feeling html mail was coming in around then, and it was before I moved to pine.
• felipemesquita 5y ago
  Unless Apple’s proxy loads every image in all emails independently of the user opening them, it’s still possible to track when a message is viewed by having images with unique URLs for each recipient.
  • gruez 5y ago
    The picture in the embedded tweet[1] suggests that the images are loaded even if they're not opened. [1] https://twitter.com/rjonesy/status/1401993816001978375/photo/1 https://twitter.com/rjonesy/status/1401993816001978375/photo...
  • crooked-v 5y ago
    > Mail Privacy Protection works by hiding your IP address and loading remote content privately in the background, even when you don't open the message. It does load all the images independently of the user opening it. My guess is that the server will pull a copy of everything as soon as the email is received and bundle it all into an inline blob that goes to the client.
• loloquwowndueo 5y ago
  Guess since I never click on those annoying “subscribe to our newsletter” pop ups, I missed out on the whole “newsletter boom” - but really if the whole complaint is about how they will no longer be able to track my behaviour so closely, I’m not too concerned about the “boom” becoming a bust.
  • theshrike79 5y ago
    I never understood the idea of newsletters. If you have the material for one, why not just put it up as a website? Provide people with RSS feeds? Maybe link the posts to FB/Instagram/TikTok whatever. Why do I need to get that stuff as an email?
    • dqv 5y ago
      Some newsletters are purely informational. I like to update my customers on upcoming holidays because it affects how we do business. I also like to update them to remind them of where they can get our W-9 form for tax filing. They're not really the type to use RSS or check the website.
      • theshrike79 5y ago
        I do get the idea of email updates in traditional businesses, it's mostly marketing. But why would heavily technical people want to clutter their inbox voluntarily with newsletters? Do some people enjoy reading long-form newsletter content in their email client that much?
        • dqv 5y ago
          That I don't understand. As has been proposed as a solution before, I see a lot more utility in a daily or weekly roundup of all newsletters delivered to my inbox. I do like to read a few specific programming-related newsletters, but don't actually clickthrough that frequently.
    • austhrow743 5y ago
• criddell 5y ago
  I think articles like this one are being a little dishonest. They can still put all the ads they want in newsletters. What they can't do (at least not like they used to do) is spy on their readers without consent.
• tyingq 5y ago
  This doesn't prevent creating unique names for the same image and sending a unique name per email. Apple's new approach hides the IP, but Gmail already does that[1], and they have more email market share, don't they? [1] https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html
  • macintux 5y ago
    Apple will apparently always retrieve the images independently of the user’s actions, so the metrics become worthless.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • tyingq 5y ago
      It's not specifically mentioned in the article I linked, but Gmail does this, and has for years.
• ryantgtg 5y ago
  When Casey Newton (author of the article) first launched his Substack newsletter, he was alarmed that the full posts were not displayed for gmail users - instead there was a "jump" (that many users probably don't see, because it's formatted as "... [Message clipped] View Entire Message"). The issue is that gmail clips emails at 102k, and the substack emails easily hit that limit when posts contain lots of urls due to 1) inline styling on links, and 2) the ballooning hyperlinks due to the tracking strings. This person found that substack was ballooning a 59 character url to over 400 characters. https://tedium.co/2020/12/22/gmail-102kb-email-size-limit-history/ https://tedium.co/2020/12/22/gmail-102kb-email-size-limit-hi... (same author, more detail): https://twitter.com/ShortFormErnie/status/1339921466830319616 https://twitter.com/ShortFormErnie/status/133992146683031961... I was hoping this incident would cause substack and others to pull back on the reins a little bit. The urls on these emails are redonk, and clearly the authors aren't happy about users missing out on content.
  • shortformblog 5y ago
    I wrote the story on the size limit issue you linked and have thoughts on the issue listed here. (Long story short: This whole issue is a byproduct of the lack of standardization in the email space, something highlighted by the use of tables in emails, which are another reason why emails are so large. Long story short, email is in need of modernization, which could lead to better options for tracking than tracking pixels, which are not anonymized enough for publisher use cases.) I agree that the amount of tracking going on in the Substack links is a bit aggressive, but I want to be careful to not put too much of the blame on them for the long links. Part of the problem is the service that Substack is using, Mailgun, is intended for transactional emails, rather than the newsletters that Substack is sending. My feeling is that Substack ramped up using Mailgun but probably needs to start building their own tech for doing this, because it’s clearly not suited for the Substack use case. Thanks for sending the link—it is super-relevant to this issue.
    • snowwrestler 5y ago
      Indeed, tables and in-line styles are industry standard email coding practices, and the main reasons email character count balloons. Tracking links are a tiny factor, unless maybe the email is stuffed with links. (I doubt Casey’s are.) Thank you for figuring out that character limit. We redesigned and recoded a template to get under it. And tables and in-line styling are industry standard for one reason: Microsoft Outlook. It still uses the ancient and horrible HTML rendering engine from MS Word, instead of a modern HTML engine like literally everybody else uses. And a ton of senders care about Outlook because so many high-value subscribers use it (e.g. corporate staff at big companies). The other factor is that the use of email to send long-form content is pretty recent. For a long time before, emails were either personal, marketing, or publishing with “click to read full article.” All pretty short.
• Yaina 5y ago
  I didn't really notice this resurgence of newsletters to be honest. But because mail is one of the few federalized systems it's pretty cool to see (maybe RSS will come back too? :o ) I also understand that you want to collect some data on how your newsletter is doing, it's just because mail isn't really designed for this that we can't separate between anonymized data collection and user tracking. That's maybe something RSS is better suited for.
  • teitoklien 5y ago
    I really really really want rss to become mainstream again. It is the best.
• ljm 5y ago
  You know, I had some beef with the word 'engaged' a few years ago, especially because I worked for a startup that cared about happiness instead (an active question rather than passive inference). In that context, we realised it was ridiculous to ask if you were engaged with your job, we wanted to know if you were happy and so we asked the questions instead of trying to secretly gather the data by spying on your activity. Now I downright hate it. What does 'engaged' even fucking mean? One definition is that you're 'locked', so your attention is locked with them and not someone else. A public toilet cubicle will say 'engaged' when someone is in it. For an email newsletter, you can see how well it's doing both by the number of subscribers on the list, and also by how many people click through and read the full article on your site. No tracking involved, you just send out an email and look at your logs for an uptick in traffic.
  • 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
    Click through detection requires inclusion of at least a newsletter id in a query parameter, or something along those lines, for the links provided within the newsletter. Without that, there’s not enough specificity to get anything other than a rough idea of how many people might have clicked the link right after you sent the email.
    • ljm 5y ago
      You can make a case for it not being tracking if it's not a link masked behind 2 or 3 redirects through ad or link tracking services. You can just have a link that you could log and rewrite in nginx/apache/caddy -> https://mysite.com/mailer/thepost https://mysite.com/mailer/thepost --> https://mysite.com/thepost https://mysite.com/thepost Or just forget about all of that and just _ask_ people and make your decisions on that instead of extrapolating meaning through espionage.
  • snowwrestler 5y ago
    > For an email newsletter, you can see how well it's doing both by the number of subscribers on the list, and also by how many people click through and read the full article on your site. How is it any more happiness-centric to force people to “click through” again and again to read the full article? This is borderline reader-hostile in 2021. The big revolution in email recently has been that the email itself is the product. Put all the content there; deliver 100% of the value with one click (the click that opens the email). This is way better for the reader than having to click 12 separate times just to read a bit.
• tekacs 5y ago
  > Given Apple's monopoly advantage with their preinstalled Mail app, we don't need much of an uptake from what they're calling Mail Privacy Protection to break the dam on spy pixels. You can't really say anything authoritatively about open rates if 5-10-30-50% of your recipients are protected against snooping, as you won't know whether that's why your spy pixel isn't tripping, or it's because they're just not opening your email. This doesn't seem true -- I imagine that most tracking providers will start to simply ignore all link opens from Apple's proxy (I assume they'll be using Apple's IP ranges or otherwise be 'detectable'). DHH doesn't seem to recognize that Apple opens the link irrespective (the spy pixel will /always/ trip, not /never/ trip), so it should even be really easy to figure out which users are using Apple Mail. That being the case, folks will only lack open data for Apple customers, without polluting the rest of the dataset.
• trasz 5y ago
  "93.5% of all email opens on phones come in Apple Mail on iPhones or iPads" How?
  • bombcar 5y ago
    93.5% of all trackable email opens on phones comes from Apple Mail on iPhones or iPads. If Google is already doing something similar for gmail then android statistics would be ignored or worthless.
  • mobjack 5y ago
    It is a measurement problem. Android users are more likely to use Gmail which proxies the images so you can't tell what device it was opened on.
• kergonath 5y ago
  I doubt it. However, it might help reining in advertisers and close a gaping leak of private information that is quite difficult for a random user to plug. I wish, anyway. We don’t owe advertisers a viable business. If their business plan depends on them sucking in private information without my consent, well, fuck them.
  • 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
    I think you may be mixing things up between advertising and marketing. Marketing is where things like newsletter click engagement tracking happens. Usually you are dealing with the actual company sending the newsletter, at that point, and not the advertising industry. Better to think of marketing engagement tracking through these dark patterns as being a form of forcibly getting you to fill out a comment card at a restaurant than to think of it as having anything to do with advertising.
• als0 5y ago
  When will Apple bring back RSS to Mail?
• smoldesu 5y ago
  I find it pretty ironic that Apple also seems to be one of the largest buyers of targeted ads. When the M1 iMac released, I couldn't visit a single website without their grating "Colors" ad puttering along on the side. If Apple considers privacy a human right, can they at treat me like a human too?
  • rickdeckard 5y ago
    Not popular here, but Apple might only be against targeted Ads if its done without Apple's participation. The general assumption of many people seems to be that Apple is taking effort to make their user Anonymous. But quite clearly it can not be in their interest to make them Anonymous to Apple. To be quite blunt: If Apple's strategy serves them right, their future user should be free to choose in all areas of his life from the options Apple curated for him.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• amelius 5y ago
  I hate advertisers like the next guy, but what I hate even more is a company acting as a regulator.
  • beervirus 5y ago
    Better a company than no one.
  • SilverRed 5y ago
    How are they acting as a regulator? They are providing features users want. And customers show again and again they are willing to pay more to increase their privacy.
• Hoasi 5y ago
  Mail privacy is the right thing to do and implement it will be a major improvement! That doesn’t threaten email newsletters that are legitimate and of interest to real subscribers. Communication should never rely on espionage tactics even for the sake of metrics. Forgo monitoring people, customers, or would-be customers, and save a ton of time as a result. Marketing experts will start talking about how two ways conversation is the ultimate email strategy that works. Send a non-tracked email, let them hit reply. Brands and consumers, united in conversation, finally. That is as horizontal as it gets.
  • graeme 5y ago
    Have you ever managed a newsletter? Mail providers such as gmail use things like open rates to determine if a message should be in important, promotions, or spam. Also, a sizeable chunk of people refuse to click unsubscribe links and instead hit the spam button. This can be a sensible response, as a lot of spam senders ignore unsubscribe. But it is also hard for legit newsletters. So what is the best practice? Pruning your list of people who never open it. This improves open rates, makes gmail like you, and unsubscribes people who already would prefer not to read your letter. Now it will be much harder to know who is inactive so you’ll end up sending more mail to people who don’t want it. And no double opt in doesn’t solve this. There are other ways around the problem, but you seem to be in complete ignorance of what newsletter senders use tracking for. Open rates also let you diagnose deliverability issues.
    • layoutIfNeeded 5y ago
      Simple: send a letter every month with a link that says “Click here if you still want to receive this newsletter”. Then remove everyone from the list who hadn’t clicked it after a week.
      • jeromegv 5y ago
        Sure, and that’s not spammy at all
        • 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• frankydp 5y ago
  Just to add a alternative voice. Open rates are an important metric for ESPs to track bad actors on their platforms. If this implementation is a 100% preload those metrics then have no value. IP anonymized pixel loads are a good compromise. But, 100% preloads would actually make email list management best practices harder to implement. Specifically unsubing subscribers that do not open over a time period. Which many ESPs do in the backend to maintain list quality and minimize spam complaints. Some level of engagement feedback at the subscriber level does have value in the spam/unwanted email workflow. Assuming you have a preexisting relationship with a business, it is not crazy on the privacy side of things to have an engagement feedback loop. Assuming you are dealing with a spammer/list buyer ip anonymization provides an appropriate level of privacy, and any additional protection should be expected by the email provider not delivering the mail.
  • wumpus 5y ago
    I am a human and I have agency. Your alternative isn't respecting my choices.
• Vomzor 5y ago
  I've been toying with the idea of starting a newsletter. How can I measure the opening rate without tracking pixels?
  • wumpus 5y ago
    Maybe you can't? Just a thought.
• cjlm 5y ago
  For a relatively-privacy-focused newsletter service check out Buttondown[0] Not affiliated, just a happy user [1] [0] https://buttondown.email https://buttondown.email [1] https://sourcetarget.email https://sourcetarget.email
• barbazoo 5y ago
  Is that the same as what Fastmail is already doing by not loading images at all and showing this warning message instead, with a link to "Load images"? > Remote images blocked to protect your privacy.
• dan-robertson 5y ago
  1. There are (perhaps silly) reasons for newsletters to have tracking which is that if you send them to people who don’t read them then, even though it’s easy to unsubscribe, big mail hosts (eg Google) can down rank your host in their spam filters. Worse still, some users treat the spam button as “please delete this thing I am not interested in” but that is not really how the signal is interpreted by the mail host. The solution is for newsletters to auto-unsubscribe users if they seem to stop interacting with the emails. 2. The actual threat to the newsletter boom is that advertisers realise that, just like every other fad format before, newsletters aren’t a particularly better way to reach audiences, and so they will stop paying so much for the ad space. Or they will move on to some other fad format and demand will fall off a cliff.
  • gsich 5y ago
    >The solution is for newsletters to auto-unsubscribe users if they seem to stop interacting with the emails. Not possible without tracking.
    • epigen 5y ago
      Click tracking
    • toomanybeersies 5y ago
      They aren't stripping query params off urls, so you can just add a recipient ID to any URLs in the email e.g. https://newsletter.com/linked-page?uid=7b32e2f7
      • gsich 5y ago
        That is ... not reliable tracking.
        • toomanybeersies 5y ago
          Works fine if you want to auto-unsubscribe recipients who don't interact with your emails.
• Jakob 5y ago
  I liked this way to contact your subscribers, I received the other day. No tracking necessary and either engagement or pruning: You signed up for my private email list at https://sive.rs/ https://sive.rs/ ... but since you've never replied, I can't tell if you're a real person. Please reply to this email and say anything, ideally something about yourself like where you are in the world. Or feel free to ask any question. (I read and reply to all. This part isn't automated. It's just me.) If you don't reply, I'll assume you're not getting this, and delete this email (redacted) from my system.
• tlogan 5y ago
  My understanding is that pixels will work but sender will not know device type, IP, etc. Am I correct? If I’m correct then how this is going to hurt newsletter publishers?
• partido3619463 5y ago
  Is it possible that Apple Mail is a huge proportion of opens because they’re one of the last to NOT block it? I thought Gmail and outlook already blocked images by default… 58% of desktop opens just seems extreme given proportion of Mac vs PC use.
  • itsdrewmiller 5y ago
    Yeah, that stat is totally unbelievable. iPhone being 20x more mobile opens than Android is also pretty sus with about 50/50 US market share and Android dominating globally.
• bombcar 5y ago
  If marketers really just care about open rates and not who is opening, why not make a standard where you can put a UUID identifying the email blast and then query Apple’s servers and get a number opened? And Apple can respond “nothing” until it sees the UUID at least X times or something.
  • anchpop 5y ago
    They also like to unsubscribe people who don’t open the emails. (This is good for the user and the sender.) An open standard could be designed for that too, though. I’m not sure Apple would implement any standard they make - there are lots of cool standards that never get implemented.
    • bombcar 5y ago
      Apple’s in a position (similar to Google with Gmail and Microsoft with Outlook) where they can make a defacto standard just by implementing it.
• lucasjans 5y ago
  Hacker News: Big tech stiffles competition, the little guy can't compete Also Hacker News: small independent publishers leveraging email for publishing shouldn't get engagement data on their independent newsletters. Aggregate open rate data is vital to a newsletter. It makes it easy to spot delivery issues. It's an early indication of content quality, and important feedback loop. I'm fully for blocking identifiable tracking. But isn't there room for a solution for anonymous engagement metrics? Email newsletters are a great way for individuals to control their distribution channel built on top of federated, decentralized technology. Adtech is the enemy.
  • sneak 5y ago
    > Aggregate open rate data is vital to a newsletter. No, it's not. Mine exists without it, and yours can too.
• mr_toad 5y ago
  This is like the “VHS will kill broadcast TV” argument all over again.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• sneak 5y ago
  Side effect: Apple's proxy servers will see every domain that emails you, even if you don't use Apple's email service. It will hide your IP and open status from the sender, but not the fact that that sender emails you from Apple.
• toomanybeersies 5y ago
  Email tracking pixels and click tracking have been ineffective for a while now anyway, as so many email servers/clients load images and crawl links without before the recipient actually opens the email.
• musicale 5y ago
  No, I Don't Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13948561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13948561
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• wumpus 5y ago
  My favorite email is the "we're going to stop sending you emails because you aren't ever opening them." I use mutt. And this is proof that it does the job.
• Lio 5y ago
  A website that provides no way to control or restrict tracking arguing for people that want to abuse html emails to do the same.
• dantondwa 5y ago
  Did the newsletter boom depend on tracking their users? I do not believe it. It is all to be demonstrated that tracking actually works.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• flohofwoe 5y ago
  Weird, at first I thought that there must be a (1999) missing in the headline :) Aren't images in HTML emails initially disabled in most "proper" mail client (like Outlook), exactly to prevent tracking through things like tracking pixels? I thought that's standard practice since at least a decade.
  • onion2k 5y ago
    The change is that Apple are going to block the tracking images even when the user displays images, presumably by loading them through a proxy given that Apple says they'll be masking IP addresses. That goes beyond simply not displaying images.
    • flohofwoe 5y ago
      Hmm I see. This of course gives Apple much more information about me than the individual newsletters could extract on their own (because all that information lands at Apple now). Not sure how this is supposed to improve privacy over simply not loading the images at all.
• aurbano 5y ago
  How many people actually subscribe/read newsletters? And if you do, which ones do you follow? (I'm honestly curious)
  • _fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
    I always read the Matt Levine newsletter "money stuff": https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/money-stuff https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/money-stuff
• voisin 5y ago
  I thought Gmail routed images through their servers to avoid pixel tracking?
• ale42 5y ago
  Thunderbird doesn't load images automatically since basically forever...
• dreamcompiler 5y ago
  I've had images turned off in my email for 20 years and I still get paper mail from banks that say "We're returning to paper statements for you because you don't seem to be reading our emails." Yes I'm reading your emails. Your email vendor is simply lying to you when they say they know when emails are not being read. Quit believing them. Maybe this move by Apple will finally get the message across.
• rekabis 5y ago
  I not only block images from loading, but I go a step further and default all eMails to plain-text display only. Which is really fun when a sender uses only HTML eMail, and has nothing at all for the plain-text portion. Those tell me that this is a particularly crappy marketer that is really only going for the low-hanging fruit, much like what Nigerian Princes do in their scams. But then again, I have a very dim view of marketing eMails anyhow. If I have a need, I’ll research it. Wait until I explicitly reach out; don’t call me, I’ll call you.