I believe if you want my location and a confirmation I've read your email you should ask me, not shadily collect information
Images Now Showing in Gmail
81–90 of 141 posts
Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail
#82This proxying actually rolled out on December 3rd to most gmail.com users. We, Streak, happenned to launch an email tracking feature on the same day (http://www.streak.com/email-tracking-in-gmail).
Here's what we've learned:
- the proxying of requests only happens when a user is viewing the mail inside Gmail (i.e. gmail does not actually affect the message body, its just proxying at render time)
- gmail only caches in the image for a few minutes. So for email marketers, if your recipient views the email then views it again a few hours later, the marketer will see two requests for the image
- there is basically no personally identifiable information in the request that Google's proxy sends to the server hosting the image. So from that perspective this is actually a boost in privacy than the previous state of the world. None of the headers, cache controls, cookies, ip addresses, referrers or user agents are passed to the original image server
- obviously you can encode some ID into the image URL itself but all that lets you do is identify the email address of the user that opened the email. But you already had their email address because you sent them an email - so again, no PII gets disclosed
- it is true that marketers will see a more accurate count of opens (because displaying images is on by default)
- there seems to be several ways to get gmail's proxy to NOT cache the image and simply proxy the request every time the user opens the emails
Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Email open" tracking just got a lot more reliable for all mass email & marketing automation vendors. Has it? If Google's proxy is caching images, then "email open" tracking might have broken entirely. All the sender would see is that their email has been opened once by the proxy -- for all gmail addresses put together.
Mass-email senders probably would put a unique identifier in the image url (different for all users), so Google will open each image, because it can't know before loading them that it's the same image.
[deleted]
Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail
#84This is a step in the right direction. However, please understand that it doesn't really make a difference in forms of real privacy Googlers! The e-mail spam/list creators are a different kind of adversary than, for example, web trackers. They will do something like this: http www theirimageserver com/images/img53.jpg?to=you@email.com (Obviously they will obfuscate and use some kind of hash instead of cleartext e-mai…
Correct me if I'm talking directly from my rear end:
For that scenario, Google could ignore the arguments and just request the file. However, I'm not sure I get Google's implementation of the proxy, but if the images are grabbed only when the email is read, it's easy to track by adding a hash to the filename itself.
So, in the email company's server, they'd have a canonical file, for instance, acme-co/dec2013news/img53.jpg. For each subscriber, they'd have something like a symbolic link to img53.jpg specific to the subscriber, for instance img53-5baa61e4c9b93f3f0682250b6cf8331b7ee68fd8.jpg.
EDIT: Checked a newsletter's source and that's what they already do. Since I don't deal with email marketing much, I honestly had no idea.
Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail
#85[Update 2: I just tested with a newly-created Gmail account and the feature did not seem to have been rolled out to the new account yet.] [Update: I'm not sure when this feature will actually be rolled out. I think my test below automatically displayed the image because my own email address appears to be implicitly a whitelisted sender (even though "images from this sender are always displayed" doesn't appear for it)…
I appreciated the lack of pictures of large penises that accompanied spam. And of course the fact that you didn't get a tracking pixel fetched. So I wonder if they are going to fetch the image from their servers, cache it, and then show it. Cutting off a supply of information for email marketers, whom they will offer to supply 'opening' information for people who use the new Gmail Promotions feature. (ok that is a lot cynical)
Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand how a proxy will protect me from an image loaded as http://marketer.com/4b3403665fea6.jpg where that hash is used to link to my email address
> I don't understand how a proxy will protect me from an image loaded as It will protect you from it being as a read receipt if (and I'm not sure if this is the case, though it should be trivial to test by sending email with images served from a site you control to an email you control without opening it) Google requests the image once it has received the email.
If you read other comments, a number of people have done the trivial test and confirmed that images aren't requested until you open the email.
Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail
#87This proxying actually rolled out on December 3rd to most gmail.com users. We, Streak, happenned to launch an email tracking feature on the same day ( http://www.streak.com/email-tracking-in-gmail ). Here's what we've learned: - the proxying of requests only happens when a user is viewing the mail inside Gmail (i.e. gmail does not actually affect the message body, its just proxying at render time) - gmail only caches…
> obviously you can encode some ID into the image URL itself but all that lets you do is identify the email address of the user that opened the email. But you already had their email address because you sent them an email - so again, no PII gets disclosed
All that lets you do is...confirm that the email address exists. Until this change, that was a very difficult thing to do; now, its equivalent to getting a message through a spam filter. This is going to help spammers _a lot_.
Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail
#88I think that's a great feature. Loading images manually is always annoying and isn't a great user experience. Novice user's don't always understand why it's risky and they probably opt to display the images anyways.
However, one interesting question is how can third-party analytics will workaround this? Is there a way? Given that gmail holds a large market share of email users, this is really going to negatively affect the usefulness of such services.
Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail
#89This proxying actually rolled out on December 3rd to most gmail.com users. We, Streak, happenned to launch an email tracking feature on the same day ( http://www.streak.com/email-tracking-in-gmail ). Here's what we've learned: - the proxying of requests only happens when a user is viewing the mail inside Gmail (i.e. gmail does not actually affect the message body, its just proxying at render time) - gmail only caches…
> there seems to be several ways to get gmail's proxy to NOT cache the image and simply proxy the request every time the user opens the emails
What are those ways?
Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail
#90"Google’s own secure proxy servers" will that mean that people who track me opening their email with 1px images won't be able to track that? I hope this is the case...
The request is still made (now via a proxy), so email opens can still be tracked. But other identifiable information (IP, user agent, etc) can't.