What is Apple Mail Privacy Protection?
Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) is technology that Apple Mail uses to obscure the identity of the recipient by loading images through a proxy server. While you may know a contact’s email address and potentially name, MPP will prevent you from seeing what IP address they use to access the internet and whether they are actually engaging with your messages.
Apple MPP will typically open a message the instant it was delivered to the inbox, thus prior to the user actually opening the message. If the subscriber then opens the message themselves a few hours later, the image requests still come through the MPP proxy, thus still looking like an MPP open. There are ways to determine an actual open when there otherwise would only be MPP events:
If the recipient clicks on any links in the email, our systems will update the open as Non-MPP so that it is included in your true open rate calculation.
If the subscriber opens the message on their desktop in say Gmail or Outlook, it will register as a Non-MPP open.
This update rolled out on February 27, 2026. The exact date when MPP detection/reporting begins may vary.
To help email marketers understand true engagement, Listrak introduced a metric to exclude MPP-originated opens and updated certain features so they no longer treat MPP opens as engagement behaviors.
💡 MPP metrics are email-only and are shown at the message level.
MPP Metrics
The platform automatically shows both the existing open metrics and the Non-MPP open metrics side-by-side to support comparison. The following dashboards include two additional columns or metrics:
Opens (Non-MPP) - Unique contact opens excluding opens flagged as Apple MPP.
Open % (Non-MPP) - Percent of opens (excluding MPP) as a portion of delivered emails.
Dashboards Impacted
Message Activity
Message History
Transactional Message Activity
Conversation Analytics
Conversation Activity
Performance Summary
Journey Hub Messages
Additional Metric Definitions
Opens - Unique contact opens (includes Apple MPP opens when detected).
Open % - Percent of opens as a portion of delivered emails.
Unique contact opens - each contact is counted once per message for opens.
Using MPP Opens in NextGen Segmentation
If you are utilizing the NextGen platform, when using open-based segmentation criteria (Opened or Last Open Date), you have the option to exclude MPP opens using the settings toggle.
Where you’ll see it in reporting
How the data is processed
MPP filtering is handled at ingestion so the Non-MPP columns are derived from the open totals minus MPP-flagged opens.
Historical behavior
Historical open engagement remain stored/visible as they were.
Historical reporting for Opens / Open % remains unchanged.
Opens logged prior to March 1, 2026 remain unchanged.
Historical messages will show the same value in the MPP and Non-MPP column.