Does MPP affect other metrics like clicks?

Short answer, clicks still work fine. Mail Privacy Protection only interferes with the tracking pixel that measures opens. Clicks happen in a completely different part of the stack.

When someone taps a link in your email, the request leaves their device and hits your link-tracking domain directly. You get the timestamp, the user agent, the click-through path, and everything downstream (conversions, form fills, purchases) exactly like you did before MPP existed.

The real damage is to anything that uses opens as an input. Click-to-open rate is the big one. CTOR is clicks divided by opens, and with Apple pre-fetching images on behalf of Mail users, the denominator is inflated by phantom opens that never happened in a human's field of view. So your CTOR looks worse than it actually is, and any lifecycle rule keyed off "hasn't opened in 90 days" is running on noisy data.

The practical fix isn't to throw opens out entirely. It's to demote them. Treat opens as a trend-line signal for comparing week over week on the same segment. Treat clicks, conversions, replies, and unsubscribes as your real decision-making metrics. Clicks are an intentional action someone chose to take, which is a much cleaner vote of interest than an image loading in a preview pane.

If you're rebuilding analytics around this, lean on webhooks to feed granular delivery and click events into your own warehouse, so you own the data even if ESP reporting shifts again. Keep watching your DMARC reports too, because the work that actually keeps mail reaching Apple inboxes (authentication, domain reputation, list hygiene) is where the engagement signal is quietly being decided now.

Want a second set of eyes on which of your metrics are still trustworthy? Review My Emails is happy to take a look.