Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Images Now Showing in Gmail

gmailblog.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 141 posts

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#131

Post by ktsmith »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #124
ktsmith wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks, the next question is if gmail sees a bunch of emails from the same sender with these hash-named images, I wonder whether they will squash them. How this plays out will be interesting to watch.

They are already scanning the content of the emails so there's nothing stopping them from determining if the images between emails are the same regardless of name, and even then just sending down whatever they have cached, 1px transparent gifs are still common for this. Could break some a/b testing software though. You could see marketers move to including a unique image per recipient like a gravatar. If it were me I'd just include something like the github avatars in the footer of every message. Google can learn that those are tracking images and block them but will they?

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#132

Post by alooPotato »

thedufer wrote: post #87
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 All that lets you do is...confirm that the email address exists. Until this change, that was a very difficult thing to do; now, its equivalent to getting a message…

It wasn't very difficult to do - in our testing, approx 60% of emails we sent out had images requested for them meaning users clicked on the display images link. May be us nerds dont do it but regular users seem more likely to.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#133

Post by ktsmith »

Gepser wrote: post #111
Wilya wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would imagine that google caches the images so there would be one request instead of two.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#134

Post by mcintyre1994 »

natch wrote: post #55
draz wrote: post #2

How does this affect invisible pixels (for analytics)?

It devalues other tracking solutions, and makes Google's own paid analytics services more compelling. So users will still be tracked, but the trackers are more likely to have to share some of the money and data with Google.

Google offer paid email analytics? Out of interest do they have a free version like they do for websites too? All I can find online are things like [0] showing how to use web analytics to track emails etc.

[0] https://plus.google.com/+DanielWaisberg/posts/XDrRoh3GoVP

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#135

Post by mratzloff »

twoodfin wrote: post #110
mratzloff wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google will (presumably) always request your image URL Why presumably?

Because relative to the quantity of email Gmail has to process, the images returned from tracking links are likely a drop in the bucket, and requesting them all provides their users with even better privacy protection than the "Show Images" toggle did. If you want to be cynical, you can note that Google will still know which emails you opened and which you did not. Does the current Gmail TOS restrict them from sellin…

If you want to be cynical (or perhaps realist), you will see this as just another effort to push marketers to paying for expanded analytics data from Google.

I doubt any of this is done with the privacy of users in mind.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#136

Post by cglace »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #124
ktsmith wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks, the next question is if gmail sees a bunch of emails from the same sender with these hash-named images, I wonder whether they will squash them. How this plays out will be interesting to watch.

"Thanks, the next question is if gmail sees a bunch of emails from the same sender with these hash-named images, I wonder whether they will squash them."

Are you saying squash the sender or squash the tracking images?

I hope gmail doesn't start squashing my emails because it contains a tracking pixel.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#137

Post by runn1ng »

shabble wrote: post #58
runn1ng wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummmm.... they already store all your e-mail . What difference does storing images make?

Because if you stop serving up the remote reference before it gets requested by a particular client, it won't be there. If it's archived {immediately,on first request} permanently thereafter, there's now another copy outwith your control. Edit: moreover, the images are requested locally by the user's browser. Google doesn't get a look at them at any point[1]. Whereas now, they get a permanent copy for free, because t…

yeah, OK, but again, it's not really an invasion of privacy bcause they get the mails and the URLs in the first place. If you don't want your e-mails read by google, you probably don't use GMail.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#138

Post by roshodgekiss »

taggartbg wrote: post #75

Does this mean that every image will be saved onto Google's proxy server at the time that Google receives it, or at the time that the user opens it? I don't want to lose the ability to track email opens to gmail users through Mandrill/SendGrid/whatever...

Many ESPs already have a workaround in place for ensuring that open % stats are not affected. Here's Campaign Monitor's take on the issue: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/4118/how-gmails-ima...

Also, a postmaster's version: http://emailexpert.org/gmail-tracking-changes-the-fix-what-y...

Disclosure that I'm from Campaign Monitor and wrote that first post. As you can imagine, we've been getting a fair few enquiries about image tracking and opens today...!

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#139

Post by username223 »

mason55 wrote: post #114
chimeracoder wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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.

It's disclosing that the spammer (or "marketer") has a valid address. Since I only load images in email from people I trust, there is no way this can increase my privacy.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#140

Post by thedufer »

alooPotato wrote: post #132
thedufer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 All that lets you do is...confirm that the email address exists. Until this change, that was a very difficult thing to do; now, its equivalent to getting a message…

It wasn't very difficult to do - in our testing, approx 60% of emails we sent out had images requested for them meaning users clicked on the display images link. May be us nerds dont do it but regular users seem more likely to.

That's assuming that people are just as likely to allow images from a message that kinda looks like spam as they are from a message that's from a person/service they know.
Post reply on HN