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.)
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.
PG recommended this method years ago for fighting spam. Puts a load on the spammers. Not sure if anyone has ever tried it at scale.
> 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.
it does, indeed, send the request when it is actually opened. see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6895876 /me goes to go find and turn on the "block third party images" feature.
Are we sure they won't programmatically/statistically detect these tracking URLs and start skipping the request after the first dozen or so retrievals out of 10,000,000?
this is what the original announcement blog post seems to imply indeed
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.)
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.
Yeah, good luck with that. Instantly, every hacker in the world would use Gmail as a DDoS amplification tool.
I don't understand how that helps. If I send an email to user_x@gmail.com with an embedded image at http://example.com/my_spam_images/image_for_user_x.jpg and google makes a request to that, I know the mail has been delivered and the user in question exists and is seeing my ads, because a request for image_for_user_x.jpg showed up in my logs. Now, when user_y also receives my spam and I get a request for image_for_us…
"I know the mail has been delivered and the user in question exists and is seeing my ads" No, you just know that the email was delivered to the user's inbox. You don't know if the user looked at it or just trashed it.
Here's the social workaround to that: Send a few e-mail campaign with "time sensitive offers" with a timer that starts on retrieval off the image with a "oh, by the way, please not that for Gmail users it starts on delivery as Gmail loads the image right away".
People love their e-mail offers. The type of users e-mail marketers want the most - namely the ones that responds to their offers very well - would be up in arms if Gmail makes them start missing out on offers.
In my opinion, Google doesn't care abut the tiny tracking images. It does care about 2M jpegs. So, while email marketers might be up in arms, this won't affect them at all it appears. If anything, they should be thanking Google for reducing their bandwidth.
> 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 ar…
If google cached them as soon as they were received wouldn't they, in some cases, effectively perform a DoS attack on whatever was hosting the image? I.e. if a spammer sent out 1,000,000 emails w/ images they were hosting, they would immediately receive 1,000,000 requests for the image.