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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

#91

Post by gfodor »

This could be anything from wildy good to wildy terrible for e-mail marketers, depending on how this ends up working. If Google makes a request for an image when the user opens the e-mail, this will be really good for e-mail marketers since now they will get accurate open stats, whereas before they only got stats for people who hit "Display Images" (surely a minority.)

On the other hand, if Google (either now or in the future, crucially) alters the behavior to be smart about pre-caching images, then e-mail marketing is screwed. It will likely make sense at Google to do this, since it will improve the user experience to have the images be pre-fetched to the proxy server before they open an e-mail.

In other words, e-mail marketing vis a vis gmail is now in a Schrodenger's cat-like situation. We can't know if Google is now fully, partially, never will, or will in the future pre-cache images, so for all intents and purposes e-mail marketing data is both highly accurate and completely worthless at the same time :)

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

#92

Post by elwell »

philip1209 wrote: post #9

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.

This raises an important point.

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

#93

Post by signed0 »

cloudwalking wrote: post #38
necubi wrote: post #19

There seems to be a lot of misinformation flying around. Here's [0] Google's support doc that clears up some of it. The most important part is at the end: "In some cases, senders may be able to know whether an individual has opened a message with unique image links. As always, Gmail scans every message for suspicious content and if Gmail considers a sender or message potentially suspicious, images won’t be displayed…

These two statements of yours seem at odds with each other: "The privacy and security protections are about preventing other information (like ip, browser headers, cookies) from leaking, rather than read notifications." "If you care about maintaining your privacy, I would recommend disabling the new functionality."

When I just tried disabling it, the images that were displayed after I clicked 'Display Images Below' all still went through the proxy.

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

#95

Post by EGreg »

petercooper wrote: post #65
seiji wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have no right to know what your users are doing after you send them a message. The privacy invading "tracking pixels" shouldn't exist in the first place.

Why shouldn't content providers be free to monitor usage if it's legal and easy to do? Would you next start to argue SaaS providers shouldn't have any Web server logs at all since it's a way of "tracking" users?

If I choose to visit a website hosted by a server operated by someone else, that server is involved and can do whatever it wants.

If a piece of content is delivered to me via the mail, I should be able to open a cached version as many times as I want without any request to the remote server.

And the cached version can be built for me by my mail system, which by ALWAYS fetching the resources protects me.

As a question of what SHOULD happen, I thinkread receipts should be voluntary.

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

#96

Post by nanidin »

AznHisoka wrote: post #68
nanidin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm - so we can flood Google's cache by sending an email full of links to procedurally generated images?

you'd flood your email server before you'd flood Google's cache.

But your email server would only need to send links to images that are gigabytes apiece, and that are generated procedurally, no?

The true bottleneck would be the pipe between your procedurally generated image server & Google's server.

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

#97

Post by polarix »

Nacraile wrote: post #62
codeflo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy: Make the "Dear " part of the email an image. Boom, deduplication fooled. (Also, they don't currently seem to do anything like you're suggesting.)

What if google just immediately fetches images for all received messages, regardless of deliverability? They can dedupe wherever possible, but the sender still ends up with no information about whether the message was delivered, much less read.

This is the correct answer. If google does not do this, well, we know whose side they're on.

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

#99

Post by Steuard »

necubi wrote: post #19

There seems to be a lot of misinformation flying around. Here's [0] Google's support doc that clears up some of it. The most important part is at the end: "In some cases, senders may be able to know whether an individual has opened a message with unique image links. As always, Gmail scans every message for suspicious content and if Gmail considers a sender or message potentially suspicious, images won’t be displayed…

Wow, I'm amazed by this. I was convinced that Google wouldn't have rolled out this new feature unless they had a way to avoid this sort of tracking. Isn't this exactly the privacy issue that led clients to adopt "Don't display images automatically by default" in the first place?

(Why wouldn't they let users combine this behavior with the old one? That is, don't display images by default, but if you choose to display them anyway, get the file from Google's proxy server.)

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

#100

Post by spb »

plorg wrote: post #51
slg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I am not sure where the original claim is coming from. It isn't that hard for Google to simply follow the links and compare the files as part of the caching process. So unless marketers start customizing the images in addition to the links, there isn't any reason why Google can't cache the images together. And even if marketers do start customizing images, hasn't Google gotten pretty good at comparing very simi…

Ok, but then Google's still making a request to, here, a user-specific URL. The spammer may not know where you are, but they now know that your address exists.

But they already knew that because they didn't get a bounce response.
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