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> E-mail marketers will no longer be able to get any information from images—they will see a single request from Google, which will then be used to send the image out to all Gmail users. Unless you click on a link, marketers will have no idea the e-mail has been seen. Absurdly wrong, marketers already use a unique image URL for each email recipient, and Google has no way to know that all of those point to the same im…
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holy smokes google is going to further grow their monopoly and try to take over the advertising market with this. They'll cache and own even more of your data and keep it out of the hands of spammers - in turn spammers will have to buy into google to get data about you. This isn't for us, this was done to make money off of us.
The images they're caching aren't mine, anyway, and in many cases they're unsolicited. Sure there's the evil aspect to this (they own advertising), but there is the potential good of obfuscating your actually private data - the IP you check your mail from, when you check it, anything you send back with an HTTP request - from marketers. On solely that note, I'm all for it. But I'm also one of those who like the new Tabs setup, and rarely loaded images for emails from people I don't know.
> E-mail marketers will no longer be able to get any information from images—they will see a single request from Google, which will then be used to send the image out to all Gmail users. Unless you click on a link, marketers will have no idea the e-mail has been seen. Absurdly wrong, marketers already use a unique image URL for each email recipient, and Google has no way to know that all of those point to the same im…
/me goes to go find and turn on the "block third party images" feature.
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.
Mmm, it sounds like Google might deduplicate the images....
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…
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.
I think it caches them the moment the email is sent?
> E-mail marketers will no longer be able to get any information from images—they will see a single request from Google, which will then be used to send the image out to all Gmail users. Unless you click on a link, marketers will have no idea the e-mail has been seen. Absurdly wrong, marketers already use a unique image URL for each email recipient, and Google has no way to know that all of those point to the same im…
This essentially allows the marketer to track whether the email was opened by default.
> E-mail marketers will no longer be able to get any information from images—they will see a single request from Google, which will then be used to send the image out to all Gmail users. Unless you click on a link, marketers will have no idea the e-mail has been seen. Absurdly wrong, marketers already use a unique image URL for each email recipient, and Google has no way to know that all of those point to the same im…
Try again. :)
So instead of my work mailing lists having accurate stats via ye olde tracking pixel, now only google does, which they will sell to their own chosen marketers and clients paying google's rate. This isn't the privacy and common-sense win you think it is.
Citation? I was not aware of this.
Why aren't images and other content included in the email itself? It seems silly to send a link to an image rather than the image itself.