61–70 of 74 posts
I simply stopped reading HTML emails and read everything in plain text. Works fine for most of the emails I receive, the ones that don't are almost always marketing emails anyway. I do realise clicking tracking links still works but they are way more visible in plain text mode and it's not that hard to copy & paste the relevant part of the link. Too bad most email clients have removed plain text rendering these days.…
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All Gmail (and presumably Inbox) images are transcoded/downloaded via Google's image proxies. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?co=GENIE.Platf...
Does that mean that if you even receive an email from a list, they get notified that you opened and read it, even if you didn't? If so, that seems bad to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All Gmail (and presumably Inbox) images are transcoded/downloaded via Google's image proxies. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?co=GENIE.Platf...
Does that mean that if you even receive an email from a list, they get notified that you opened and read it, even if you didn't? If so, that seems bad to me.
> senders may be able to know whether you've opened an email that has an image attached to a unique link
My limited understanding is that the load happens on first open, from Google's servers.
I simply stopped reading HTML emails and read everything in plain text. Works fine for most of the emails I receive, the ones that don't are almost always marketing emails anyway. I do realise clicking tracking links still works but they are way more visible in plain text mode and it's not that hard to copy & paste the relevant part of the link. Too bad most email clients have removed plain text rendering these days.…
Not too many metions of email clients except mutt and alpine.
Doesn't Google immediately download any external images/assets in an email and cache them to prevent exactly this?
It's my understanding that they only download the assets when you first read the message. So it protects your IP address, but it doesn't protect the fact that you read the message. [edit] Yes, I have just confirmed this by using emailprivacytester.com
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> For instance, why do we not see in every client a big warning at the top saying something like: “NOTE: YOU HAVE NEVER RECEIVED E-MAIL FROM THIS INTERNET LOCATION BEFORE.”? Because that is way too dangerous a policy. Recently, I moved, and in creating online accounts for online bill pay, I got confirmation emails from each of my utilities. Saying that they're spam just because you've never received email from them w…
> Saying that they're spam just because you've never received email from them would cause most people to be unable to find these confirmation messages. It's not saying that they are spam. It's just saying that you never received a message from them. That account confirmation email you are expecting will be obviously marked, but that phishing email claiming to be from your bank will be marked too. You look at the mark…
Inexperienced users want to be told what to do. You can't just throw information or warnings at them without giving them a way to act on it.
Combine that with the fact that if the users even read the warnings they are going to only read a sentence at most, or just the first option.
So when you show a warning like"you have never received email from this address before" users are going to ask what they should do. Is this dangerous? Did it come from my bank? I've had this bank for years! Does this mean the email is a hacker!?
If you say "it can be dangerous, but it also can be just a new email" that will be read as "yes this is dangerous" and now they will learn the hard way that it is safe, and your warnings will have less weight in the future (they were wrong about this being "a hacker" once, they might be wrong this time too!)
It's a really hard problem to solve, and the "easy way out" is to not show the information at all (no confusion if you just don't show it!) But that kind of just kicks the can to the user leaving them to determine if an email is "good" or "bad".
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Does that mean that if you even receive an email from a list, they get notified that you opened and read it, even if you didn't? If so, that seems bad to me.
No. From the link: > senders may be able to know whether you've opened an email that has an image attached to a unique link My limited understanding is that the load happens on first open, from Google's servers.
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> For instance, why do we not see in every client a big warning at the top saying something like: “NOTE: YOU HAVE NEVER RECEIVED E-MAIL FROM THIS INTERNET LOCATION BEFORE.”? Because that is way too dangerous a policy. Recently, I moved, and in creating online accounts for online bill pay, I got confirmation emails from each of my utilities. Saying that they're spam just because you've never received email from them w…
> Saying that they're spam just because you've never received email from them would cause most people to be unable to find these confirmation messages. It's not saying that they are spam. It's just saying that you never received a message from them. That account confirmation email you are expecting will be obviously marked, but that phishing email claiming to be from your bank will be marked too. You look at the mark…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
oh god I wish spammers did this. Imagine: "we notice you don't care about our spam advertising, we'll remove you from our list" heaven.
I've gotten that but it is an unfulfilled promise. It was just another cheap trick to attempt to get me to click their link.
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Gmail actually takes steps to protect privacy when loading images. Apple's mail apps are the ones that load images indiscriminately. Pretty sure that's for UX reasons not ads.
Not sure what you mean by, "Apple's mail apps are the ones that load images indiscriminately"? I've been using Apple's Mail.app for years on many different machines with many different accounts from different providers, and I have image loading turned off. I've never seen it load an image when I didn't ask it to. Furthermore, it sounds like Gmail will download all images from a mail and store them on Google's servers…