Oops. Apparently, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection features, introduced with iOS 15, doesn’t extend to the Apple Watch.
Here’s how Apple describes Mail Privacy Protection:
In the Mail app, Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. The new feature helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.
For a number of years, Intelligent Tracking Prevention has helped protect Safari users from unwanted tracking by using on-device machine learning to stop trackers while allowing websites to function normally. This year, Intelligent Tracking Prevention is getting even stronger by also hiding the user’s IP address from trackers. This means they can’t utilize the user’s IP address as a unique identifier to connect their activity across websites and build a profile about them.
However, as noted by iMore, New research appears to show that the Apple Watch Mail app is leaking people’s IP address even when they have Mail Privacy Protection enabled. The article notes: It isn’t immediately clear whether this is a bug or if Mail is working as designed. Apple’s documentation about Mail Privacy Protection isn’t clear as to whether watchOS 8 is included.
