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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

#101

Post by ceejayoz »

surrealize wrote: post #57
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.)

With google's machine learning brain trust, I think they could still do a pretty good job deduping. Maybe not perfect, but I'd bet on them to win an arms race. Edit: ah, codeflo and EGreg are right. I was just thinking about the task of determining that the images serve the same role in each message (which I'm sure google could do a good job of). But (as they point out) in the "Dear " case they'll still have to show…

> But (as they point out) in the "Dear " case they'll still have to show the right image to the right user.

They could do a "This sender appears to be attempting to track you. We have disabled images as a precaution. Click here to load."

Scary enough to the average user it'd probably kill the the technique very quickly.

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

#102

Post by necubi »

Steuard wrote: post #99
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…

They do combine those behaviors. The proxying is on for everybody, regardless of whether you disable showing images automatically.

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

#103

Post by buro9 »

codeflo wrote: post #12

> 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…

> Now, an open question is if Google will make that request when the email is actually opened, which would allow marketers to determine if and when the email was read by the user, or if Google will make the request as soon as the email is received. The latter would enhance users' privacy at the cost of bandwidth for Google, but early tests indicate that they don't actually do that, waiting for the user to click the email to make the request.

I've just tested this.

The image was retrieved when I viewed the email in Gmail.

The tracking info basically comes back as "anonymous" and viewed from an unknown location.

The image was retrieved twice even though I only viewed the email once.

Currently I'd say that seeing the image being viewed is still valuable. I'm sure Google could move to proactively fetching the images in future destroying even that value.

The image is cached (via browser headers), but isn't aggressively cached (via reverse proxy). Fresh views on different browsers or a later session would still result in a request for the image back to the source server... registering the view again.

My personal view on all of this is that this is a bit Microsoft... you know, convenience and features over security and privacy.

For me, this "feature" leaks data about what I view to 3rd parties where today I block all images and do not leak that info.

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

#105

Post by d0ugie »

Oh please Google, I know you're listening: Transcode the cached images into WebP for Chrome and compatible mobile apps. Seems like a very, very good opportunity to evangelize the format and push it another notch toward ubiquity (while saving lots of bytes and improving email experiences)...

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

#107

Post by lmkg »

momokatte wrote: post #45
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #16

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.

Your work mailing lists only have accurate stats if all of the recipients currently enable loading of images by default. I don't think you're being sincere in your concern.

No one in the industry believes that open rate is 100% accurate, or even 50% accurate. It doesn't need to be. It's a directional measure: Which subject lines have better open rate, how does open rate decline as you send more frequently, which mailing lists or demographics have better open rates to the same email, etc.

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

#108

Post by yuliyp »

nanidin wrote: post #96
AznHisoka wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whose pipe is the one clogged completely by this? Yours or Google's? Congratulations, even if Google does this stupidly you just DOSed yourself. I'd imagine there are a ton of protections in place for their proxies to not take stuff offline, such as max-length limits, per-host limits, etc.

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

#109

Post by jfoster »

codeflo wrote: post #12

> 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…

I think any email marketers who want to get around this easily can. Just change robots.txt to not give permission to Google fetching the images. Copyright will laws will prevent them from wilfully ignoring that, presumably.

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

#110

Post by jblow »

jaxn wrote: post #86
Nacraile wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AND it could create a dis-incentive to load up an email with unique images since as soon as you send the email out all of those gmail addresses are coming right back at your server to request the images.

And then you can cause Google to DDoS someone else's site by sending out spam containing lots of image URLs.
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