Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

Yes, that's exactly what happens. Proxying the image only hides the user's IP address. If the images in the email load from external resources like https://example.com/fetch-resource?id=something_unique GMail has no way of knowing if something_unique uniquely identifies a user.

This is why disabling images is helpful. Of course Gmail also lets you enable images per sender, and you may find that quite acceptable for sites you have a relationship with (e.g. a shopping site which already knows your IP address and is sending you delivery notifications).

“Organizations should ensure that they have disabled HTML from being used in emails, as well as disabling links. Everything should be forced to plain text. This will reduce the likelihood of potentially dangerous scripts or links being sent in the body of the email, and also will reduce the likelihood of a user just clicking something without thinking about it. With plain text, the user would have to go through the process of either typing in the link or copying and pasting. This additional step will allow the user an extra opportunity for thought and analysis before clicking on the link.”

https://theconversation.com/the-only-safe-email-is-text-only...

That said theres another post on the front page about an Apple mail zero click exploit involving attachments so even plain text can’t dodge everything.

We rotated through a team of freelancers that specialize in email development. All the freelancers we worked with did email development full-time. They didn't make websites, they didn't do SEO, they just knew email inside and out. They specialize in email, and we paid a premium to them for that expertise. This is important because you want the emails to work on all platforms. So while it might seem easy to just swap out text, it can sometimes cause layout issues (email is very finicky) and we didn't want any of those glitches negatively effecting the brand. The emails generated tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue per email on average. So no one batted an eye at $500 to make the email. You are paying for the right person to do the job, not micro-analyzing their hours.

We made a lot more money from those emails than the freelancers made by making the emails. So you also want to make them happy, because good email developers are a dying breed. They are hard to find.

I should say that part of process was testing the emails. We ran email device and litmus tests for every email that had to be done as part of the development process. So when I got the finished email from the freelancer, they always submitted a link to a full litmus test result page which showed the email presented in about 30 different device, resolution, and email client combinations. That's what was required for me to approve the email and for the freelancer to get paid.

So the freelancer wasn't just swapping text, but testing the email for us and making any fixes so it worked consistently. They would also add variables for things like %%firstname%% or whatever. We would also run "conditional emails" several times a month that were customized to a customer's location (for example New York customers got a different email than California customers) or some other segment. But conditional emails were more advanced and would run closer to the $2,000 mark. Again, conditional emails out-performed blast emails (uncustomized), so they would consistently bring in 6-figure revenues on those days from the email, so no one thought twice about the $2,000 bill from the email developer.