The Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) feature from Apple has ushered in lasting changes for email marketers. These changes — spanning data acquisition, engagement tracking, and user privacy — have forced marketers to adapt and evolve their best practices. One of the most consequential features in this privacy push is Hide My Email (HME), which continues to affect marketing email collection and deliverability. And with Gmail developing a similar capability, the stakes are higher than ever.
What is Hide My Email?
The Hide My Email (HME) feature creates randomly-generated, unique email addresses for Apple users. These addresses can be used wherever an email is required — marketing forms, account creation, website downloads. Apple allows users to generate as many HME addresses as they like via iCloud or Sign In With Apple. Apple devices can also auto-fill these generated emails on forms.
Users can turn email forwarding on or off at any time, meaning messages may or may not reach their primary inbox. Since HME addresses replace the primary email entirely, marketers may never know a user’s real email address.
How Will Hide My Email Affect Marketers?
Apple remains the dominant email client globally. What was approximately 47% of email opens when HME launched has grown significantly — estimates from 2025 put Apple Mail adoption at roughly 52–64% of subscribers in B2C email campaigns. The impact of HME is therefore larger today than when it first launched, not smaller.
The core deliverability risk hasn’t changed: if a user deactivates their HME relay address, any emails sent to that address will hard bounce. Enough hard bounces, and your sender reputation suffers — just as it would from spam complaints. There is no reliable pattern or way to identify randomized HME addresses, which limits your ability to proactively filter them out (with the exception of the @privaterelay.appleid.com domain).
HME also compounds the open rate problem created by MPP. Because MPP pre-loads email content — including tracking pixels — for emails opened in Apple Mail, open rate data is already unreliable. Marketers running on inflated open metrics may not notice HME-related bounce signals until real damage is done.
What’s New: Gmail Shielded Email and iOS 26
Gmail Shielded Email
Apple is no longer the only player here. Google is developing a feature called Shielded Email, which would allow Android users to generate unique relay addresses — similar to HME but available free to all Android users, not just iCloud+ subscribers. Integrated into Gboard’s autofill system, it would suggest a randomized alias (e.g., [email protected]) during sign-up flows. Users could disable forwarding from any alias at any time via Gmail settings.
As of June 2026, Shielded Email has not been officially released or publicly confirmed by Google — it has only been spotted in APK code. However, given Apple’s influence and Google’s stated commitment to privacy, marketers should treat this as a near-certainty rather than a maybe. The combined reach of Apple HME and a live Gmail equivalent would cover the vast majority of consumer inboxes.
iOS 26 Promotional Digest
Apple’s upcoming iOS 26 is expected to introduce a “Promotional Digest” feature that groups multiple marketing emails into a single summarized view — similar to Gmail’s Promotions tab. This could further reduce individual email visibility and delay when subscribers see your messages. Relevance and strong sender reputation will be the deciding factors in whether your emails appear prominently or get buried.
What Can Email Marketers Do to Adjust to Apple’s HME?
Understand the intent behind HME use
Consumers who use relay addresses typically want to access an offer or piece of content without committing to an ongoing relationship. Before optimizing for acquisition volume, ask whether these users belong in your database at all — or whether their presence is inflating list size while dragging down engagement and email deliverability metrics.
Build for the subscriber who stays
Focus acquisition energy on users who genuinely want to hear from you. During sign-up, clearly communicate the value of your email program. Set expectations in the sign-up flow and your welcome email about the type and frequency of content subscribers will receive. Serialized campaigns that build a relationship over time are more likely to earn a real email address and a retained subscriber.
To adapt, marketers should:
- Focus on the benefits of receiving your emails during the sign-up process.
- Set expectations on the type and frequency of messages in your welcome email.
- Use serialized content that builds a relationship and establishes ongoing value.
Shift away from open rates
With MPP pre-loading pixels and HME masking real recipients, open rates are no longer a reliable primary metric. Reorient measurement around clicks, conversions, and revenue attribution. Adjust automation triggers — abandoned cart flows, re-engagement campaigns — to use click-based signals rather than opens.
Monitor bounces and filter strategically
If you’re not already tracking hard bounce rates closely, start now. A spike in bounces could signal a wave of deactivated HME addresses. Examine what percentage of your list uses @icloud.com, @me.com, @mac.com, or @privaterelay.appleid.com. Depending on your deliverability threshold, you can filter these domains from reporting or restrict form submissions to exclude them.
For B2B marketers, requiring corporate or business email domains remains an effective approach — it naturally filters out relay addresses and improves list quality at the same time.
Provide value, consistently
The most durable defense against privacy features — whether from Apple, Google, or whoever comes next — is relevance. Segment your list. Send content each segment finds useful. Let subscribers set preferences and honor them. The marketers who will navigate this era successfully are those building genuine relationships with their audiences, not those optimizing around tracking limitations.
Bottom line
Apple’s privacy features aren’t going away, and with Gmail’s Shielded Email on the horizon, the window for acquisition practices that depend on passive data collection is closing. Treat HME as a forcing function to do the things that improve email marketing regardless: better segmentation, cleaner lists, clearer value propositions, and engagement metrics that reflect real human behavior.