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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

#171

Post by vidarh »

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.

We manage opt-in mailing lists for customers of restaurant chains, and for well timed, well-targeted campaigns they get open rates in the 30%-40% range with the majority of opens within 15-30 minutes of the send anyway. It takes more resources for us to handle the outbound mail load than to handle the inbound image requests, as for the image requests the url's contains enough info to do a trivial regexp based rewrite and fetch the images from a cache. I don't think handling a 100% open rate as soon as the mail was delivered would even remotely be a challenge.

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

#172

Post by raldi »

mnutt wrote: post #162

Some other technical aspects of this: GMail serves all images from a datacenter in Mountain View, CA, so if your email's images were served from multiple datacenters or a CDN, there is a good chance they will load more slowly, depending on your caching headers. They optimize images on the fly, which may introduce more latency. Their optimizer doesn't take into account whether the optimized image is smaller than the o…

> GMail serves all images from a datacenter in Mountain View, CA

Citation needed.

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

#173

Post by chaz »

killertypo wrote: post #15

holy 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.

> They'll cache and own even more of your data

As a Gmail user, that's what I want.

> keep it out of the hands of spammers - in turn spammers will have to buy into google to get data about you.

Again, that's what I want. Spammers depend upon an incredibly low cost of sending emails with almost no accountability through botnets and foreign servers. If they need to open Google advertising accounts, provide a credit number, have to get their ads approved, and get charged market rates for their impressions ... I'm all for it.

But none of them will actually do it. Google won't make a dime from them.

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

#174

Post by jfoster »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #153
jfoster wrote: post #109

Earlier 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.

robots.txt is for crawlers, it would not stop an email client from rendering the email on behalf of its user upon receipt.

So then what gives Google the legal right to fetch, store, and re-serve the images?

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

#176

Post by vidarh »

pramodliv1 wrote: post #72
surrealize wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google could retrieve and cache a random sample of the images and hash them. Then they could note which image links go to the same images. And they could identify image links by noting that a bunch of emails have the same structure except for one image link that's different for every recipient. So I think they actually could take a pretty good stab a deduping images with unique tracking URLs. It might not be perfect,…

What if the images are slightly modified for each user? A mixture of image processing and hashing can be used for deduping though.

E-mail marketing companies would make a fortune coming up with "image composition plugins" for their systems. E.g. manipulating background patterns; alter the positioning of image elements; change text positioning, size, fonts; change objects in the images.

It'd be a gold mine.

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

#177

Post by thaumaturgy »

ivanca wrote: post #164
thaumaturgy wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't describing a new tactic for spamming, I was describing possible new tactics for targeted attacks. They're different things.

An attack that relies on the possibility of being able to send millions of emails without being detected as spam; so it is unlikely to succeed.

Gmail has probably the best spam filtering in the world, but you seem to think it's flawless, and it's not. I just now signed into my old Gmail account for the first time in ages. There's spam in there, and recent too. Roughly one per day by the looks of it -- messages that aren't newsletters, or from previous contacts, or anything that I signed up for.

And spammers aren't even that smart, they're just numerous and financially motivated.

If somebody wanted to annoy someone else with this, they could.

And, again, even if this doesn't work against Google directly, it certainly would work against other service providers who decide to follow Google's lead.

Heck, just look at the recent popularity of the WhatsApp spam that spread malware to tons of people (including Cryptolocker in some cases), or the "Secure Document" phish that made the rounds in Gmail in September.

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

#178

Post by vidarh »

cstrat wrote: post #111
MrClean wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider this @codeflo: 1. Google may cache all images in all emails sent to gmail.com instantly and regardless of the existence of the address. This would remove the possibility for marketers to check user timestamp, remove user data from request and hide user email existence. 2. Google does _not_ need to save each image from each unique URL separately, all they need to do is fetch each image and check against an al…

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...

In the e-mail campaigns we send every image is a tracking image. It all just goes into our log files an is then post-processed, so the additional cost of processing every image is minimal compared to the rest of the cost of the send.

Using a separate tracking pixel is pointless unless you for some reason want to let some third party track the opens (which some people might, e.g. to prove certain open rates)

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

#179

Post by FiloSottile »

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.

I reply to this question here. Sadly, a request is done each time and only when a user loads the image.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6898087

Which makes the Ars article even more wrong.

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

#180

Post by pud »

300bps wrote: post #78
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…

As someone who co-invented email image bugs with a million other programmers over 15 years ago, you are absolutely correct. (for the curious, my reason for coming up with it was to tell when a customer who requested a car insurance quote from the company I worked at read their email which instantly initiated an outbound call to them). The entire article is just plain wrong. For instance: This move will allow Google t…

Google could check if GUID_1.jpg is the exact same image as GUID_2.jpg.

If the same, just show a cached version. No more tracking.

(of course, email marketers would thwart this by making each image slightly different. google would respond by checking if the images are almost exactly the same. repeat. whack-a-mole ad infinitum).

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