How does Apple’s privacy proxy affect link reporting?

This is a common confusion, and it's worth being specific: Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) primarily affects image loading, not link clicking. The open tracking problem and the click tracking problem are separate.

MPP pre-fetches and caches images through Apple's proxy servers. That's what creates phantom opens. But MPP doesn't automatically click links. It doesn't navigate to your tracking redirect URLs. A click still requires a human to tap or click a link.

So your click data is generally not inflated by MPP in the same way open data is. If you see a click in your analytics from an Apple Mail user, it's almost certainly a real click. That's one reason click rate is considered a more reliable engagement signal than open rate in the post-MPP era.

There are some edge cases. If Apple ever decides to pre-fetch link destinations for link preview or security scanning purposes, that could change. Some researchers have also documented Apple scanning specific types of links in limited circumstances. But this isn't the same as systematically clicking every tracking URL the way Proofpoint or Mimecast do in enterprise environments.

The practical guidance: don't adjust your click reporting to account for Apple MPP the way you should adjust your open reporting. Link scanner bot clicks from corporate email gateways are a much bigger issue for click data accuracy than Apple's proxy.