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Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers

arstechnica.com

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Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers

#5

Post by mml »

kevrone wrote: post #2

Holy crap. If I'm reading this right, this basically destroys all pixel tracking, so no more email open stats, no nothing.

Yup.

I'd really hate to be in the bulk email business today. Perhaps google will sell them back the data they used to create themselves.

Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers

#7

Post by Pxtl »

Seems pretty trivial for marketers to work around by making each image request a unique URL per-recipient. Assuming Google's proxy fetches the image when the user opens the email, you could use that technique to find out when a user reads the sent mail.

You wouldn't get the IP address like you would with conventional bugging, but you could still find out how many users read the mail and what time they did so.

Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers

#8

Post by typpo »

kevrone wrote: post #2

Holy crap. If I'm reading this right, this basically destroys all pixel tracking, so no more email open stats, no nothing.

Not quite. According to testers in the other thread[1], Google pulls images on mail open. This means marketers will get more accurate email open stats because now the default behavior is to load images. However, they don't get cookies, IP, etc so they lose some of that capability. Not all bad for marketers and spammers.

I tried to opt-out of external content in Settings > General but unfortunately it's still loading images.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6895606

Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers

#9

Post by philip1209 »

I wonder whether this applies only to the web UI.

I've seen a couple startups that were working on dynamic email marketing - they fed in the content as an image, e.g. a "one-day promotion", but would change the image content server-side for future email opens to reflect current details. I guess that this breaks that functionality.

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