Facebook is doing this from decades.
Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
131–140 of 322 posts
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So they strip the images and show you a text only email and tell you to deal with it.
True, that would close off this avenue. Would be interesting to know if that's how they handle this currently.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#133> 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 e…
Wait, do I understand you correctly that Google fetched the image even before you requested that images be displayed in the email? That seems like a boon to marketers, not a bane.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#134Just encode the random information in the domain :)
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#135Oh 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)...
Yes, this is a good idea, hotmail should do the same to promote whatever MS is promoting ATM.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#136> 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…
In fairness, it's a partial privacy improvement - it masks IP and user agent, as well as repeat opens.
I believe if you want my location and a confirmation I've read your email you should ask me, not shadily collect information
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#137So 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.
> which they will sell ... Citation? I was not aware of this.
He is only assuming. Since this is new, and the info was free to begin with, there might not be anything against this in the privacy policy? but I don't want to read the whole policy to find out.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#138> 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…
> Google has no way to know that all of those point to the same image. Try again. :)
De-duplication is already a "big deal" in lots of hosting situations, such as box.net, dropbox, etc. I doubt it's outside of the skillset of engineers at google to address the problem. Especially given that google already has the technology to do image searches based on other images.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 e…
Wait, do I understand you correctly that Google fetched the image even before you requested that images be displayed in the email? That seems like a boon to marketers, not a bane.
A dialog popped up when I logged into email, and before I'd seen this thread.
That dialog was much along the lines of "We'll now show you images in your email automatically." with a big "OK" button.
I don't recall whether there was a less prominent "No, thanks" as I was only logging on to reply to one question really quickly.
I suspect this is a UX anti-pattern. I've gone back into my settings and changed it back to "Don't display images".
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#140holy 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.
While this will, indeed, take away some information from email marketers, it may also give them more, different information. Now, instead of getting a lot of personally identifiable information from some users (some=the percentage which still used clients that don't block image requests), they will probably get less information, but from a wider set of users - those who use the default settings in Gmail.
On the one hand, their proxy solution has a positive effect for privacy, but on the other hand, the load-by-default setting has a negative effect.
Either way, Google already knows which e-mails you're opening, so using an image proxy is not going to give them "even more of your data" that they didn't already have.