Excellent, I've always wanted e-mail clients to do it this way.
You send me a mail - you've no business being able to track if/when/how I open the envelope, unless I explicitly wish to inform you.
Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
151–160 of 322 posts
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#152AdSense. This is all about pushing dollars to AdSense.
First they started filtering marketing messages into separate tabs, which I'm assuming dramatically cut readership. Now they're going to make it impossible to "bug" emails for read receipts. The only metric left is the "click".
Email marketing just became a whole lot less valuable.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#153> 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.
robots.txt is for crawlers, it would not stop an email client from rendering the email on behalf of its user upon receipt.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#154Oh 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)...
The article doesn't mention it, but the proxy IS transcoding the cached images. However, there are many instances where the resulting images are larger and/or look worse than the originals.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#155I 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.
Such functionality should be broken - my email archive should be a permanent record of what you sent, not something the sender is able to tweak afterwards.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#156> 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…
> 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.
But that option to not see images is still there, and if you've defaulted it to off you still wont see images. Unless I misread the blog post.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#157I 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.
Google isn't new to this whole "caching" thing. I would expect them to respect whatever cache expiration directives the web server provides.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Scary enough to the average user it'd probably kill the the technique very quickly.
I'm not sure about that. It's nothing that desktop clients such as Thunderbird haven't been doing for years. I don't see any remote images in any e-mail until I click to say load them, and this works in much the same way that plug-in elements like Flash and Java are now click-to-show in various browsers. Numerous marketers and mailing list services still use the technique to track an approximation of reader numbers, though.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought that 99% of the images included in emails for tracking purposes are single pixel transparent GIFs - so no biggie in working out which ones those are...
Then they switch to two-pixel transparent GIFs as a workaround.
god damn marketing geniuses.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#160Depending on Google's caching strategy and deduping capabilities, I wonder if longer term any embedded IMG link will start to count towards your quota...
In order to maintain privacy it's been well discussed they would have to cache always and forever. So large images will definitely add up over time.
I also wonder, even if they have a persistent cache, you might still want to check the Last-Modified and Etag of the URI. I don't think many people embed dynamic images like this, and I'm not sure how most clients would handle it, but it's an interesting corner case.
Seems like a safer first step would have been turning on the Silk-like proxy and keeping image display logic the same. Then you have only benefits due to reduced Cookie, Referral, and IP masking, and could also look for corrupt images which are actually JavaScript and that sort of thing. This wouldn't have been a shot across the bow of the golden goose of open tracking, which imputes Google's true motives.
Saying that the proxy is enough to require everyone to opt-out of auto-images may be a bridge too far, especially when there are ways to register your domain so that inline-images ARE automatically displayed, which IMO is what they should be encouraging.
Another way at this would be to find a UI widget which helped users actually understand the possible tracking info they would be giving up to the sender.
Still further putting control in hands of the sender would be a data tag on the IMG which told Google they should cache, and in exchange would result in wider image viewership. Tracking opens, actions, and coverts is the most important metrics to providing feedback to improving copy, it's devious for a display ad company to fuck with this on shaky privacy grounds. I guess at least they do provide an opt-out, which will be used by ~0.1% of users...