It's no secret that online activities are tracked. One of the ways to do that is through unnecessary emails that tend to reach our mailbox quite often. These emails use a number of covert methods to access your information and know how you interact with them. The latest versions of iOS 15 and macOS 12 aim to deal with such unwanted emails with a feature called "Mail Privacy Protection". If you want to use this feature and keep your web activity private, here's how to enable Mail Privacy Protection on macOS Monterey.

First, let's understand a little about how advertisers track you via email. Most of the time, advertisers primarily use remote images that are loaded when they open an email for tracking purposes. But they also use tracking pixels to collect information about the user. These tiny pixels are usually hidden in the plain white text and are hardly visible to the human eye. When the email is opened, the code in the pixels collects the required information (such as what type of email was opened, time the email was checked, how often the email was viewed, and more) and sends it to these advertisers. This is how a custom profile of the user's online activity across websites is made.

Apple's new privacy feature ensures that your personal information is not accessed. For this, the Mail Privacy Protection feature hides your IP address from these trackers and loads all remote content privately. This way, the invisible trackers cannot access any of your data. Another good part is that when this feature is enabled, the content will load in the background even when you haven't opened the mail. This makes it even more difficult for the trackers to know about your activity. Apple also uses multiple proxy servers and assigns a random IP address to make things more secure.

As a result, email senders can only see an IP address corresponding to the region in which you are located and the actual information is never collected. In addition, the data is non-specific and random, making it difficult for advertisers to build your online profile.