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Images Now Showing in Gmail

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Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#111

Post by Gepser »

Wilya wrote: post #76
mtrimpe wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they could retrieve every image sent to a gmail address immediately, regardless of whether you viewed it or not. That would essentially render open statistics meaningless and would let Google cripple another industry after the promotions tab and 'not provided.' I really hope they don't because it's such valuable information when creating email copy...

I agree they could do it, but people upthread are suggesting that Google doesn't do that, and only loads the image when you open the message.

they could track if an email was opened twice

first one = Google

second one = user

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#112

Post by ChuckMcM »

cglace wrote: post #106
ChuckMcM wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

There is still a way to track opens for images but it is now impossible to detect device and location.

That has got to be a neat trick. If a Google server does the fetch, how would you detect opens other than theirs?

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#113

Post by [deleted] »

cglace wrote: post #106
ChuckMcM wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

There is still a way to track opens for images but it is now impossible to detect device and location.

[deleted]

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#114

Post by mason55 »

chimeracoder wrote: post #109
alooPotato wrote: post #82

This 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 This functions as a read receipt (like the tracking pixels). The image might be cached later, but since it is initially loaded the first time an email with it is…

> I would not say that "no PII gets disclosed".

And I would say you don't know what PII means.

You might consider this to be a violation of privacy but you're not disclosing any PII that the sender didn't already have. And in fact it's decreasing the amount of PII that's being disclosed because you're not longer sending any browser information when the image is loaded.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#115

Post by staticfish »

thedufer wrote: post #86
dragonwriter wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Wow this is really dreadful.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#116

Post by staticfish »

anonsumus wrote: post #71
seanalltogether wrote: post #46

Earlier 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

It will if the images are cached.

No it wouldn't. You can't tell anything about what's on the other end of random_unique_number_65984654.jpg

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#117

Post by exhilaration »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #112
cglace wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is still a way to track opens for images but it is now impossible to detect device and location.

That has got to be a neat trick. If a Google server does the fetch, how would you detect opens other than theirs?

Easy: a unique image URL for each recipient. Seems like a huge win for marketers and spammers.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#118

Post by dugmartin »

danielnr wrote: post #61
nkoren wrote: post #54

Earlier 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.

http://example.com/trackingimage.php?email={yourusername}@gm... Or, if they snip the GET variable for whatever reason (I don't see them doing this): http://example.com/gmail/{yourusername}/trackingimage.php Or even: http://example.com/{emailidfromadatabase}/trackingimage.php This tactic is already in use by most mass email companies.

I'd imagine that they are going to de-dup the images they proxy which means email marketers need to generate unique images per mail and that means no more 1-pixel tracking images.

A solution would be 1-pixel high tracking lines - a 1 x 128 pixel wide image that encoded 0 and 1 as two RGB colors adjacent to the mail's background color in the visual spectrum so the difference isn't noticeable would encode a sha-1 hash placed in the url.

  http://example.com/tracking-line/{hash}.png

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#119

Post by ktsmith »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #112
cglace wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is still a way to track opens for images but it is now impossible to detect device and location.

That has got to be a neat trick. If a Google server does the fetch, how would you detect opens other than theirs?

Uniquely name at least one image per outgoing email where the image name is tied to a recipient ie a316f002a5d080a613dce89a4ad8f9a9.gif uniquely identifies myemail@gmail.com. If google doesn't fetch the image until you open the email you can also determine open time. If they request and cache all images at the time the email is received regardless of its having been opened then this doesn't work.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#120

Post by alooPotato »

stephenhuey wrote: post #101
alooPotato wrote: post #82

This 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…

Thanks for the information! So if you want to display a dynamic image containing real-time information when the recipient opens the email, it will still work since Gmail only caches the image for a short time, right?

Depends what you want to base the dynamic information on. If you want it to be time based, I.e the current t stock price then that should still be possible. But say you want it to be based on user location, like the weather in the users location then that won't work because you won't have the users original IP address so you won't be able to roughly detect their location.
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