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

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

#201

Post by Silhouette »

Nacraile wrote: post #191
Silhouette wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if google just immediately fetches images for all received messages, regardless of deliverability? I'm trying to work out whether this is more useful as a way to get Google to DoS themselves or as a way to get them to DoS arbitrary web sites of others. Either way, isn't this a gift to trouble-makers? Of course Google would probably develop an automated defence against such attacks quickly if they happened in pra…

I'm fairly sure sending an email is more expensive than sending a GET, so it should be more effective for an attacker to make the requests directly than trying to use this to get google to proxy an attack. I also strongly suspect that google's crawling infrastructure is more than capable of fetching a bunch of images for every single message gmail receives. But even if I'm wrong about the above, google is perfectly c…

In reality, I'd be less worried for Google and more worried for whoever is hosting moderately large images that get linkjacked in numerous variations (http://www.example.com/largeimg.png?randomnumber=72435).

Google can't tell, a priori, whether or not a series of similar e-mails sent to many thousands of people with Google Mail addresses and containing similar but different image links like the above is a genuine mail going out to someone's list or a DDoS of www.example.com in which Google is about to become an unwitting participant.

By the time they've worked out whichever trick is being used this time (in the same way that they adapt to changing black hat SEO tactics, but probably only make major changes every few months) it's not hard to see a hostile party busting the bandwidth cap for anyone on a basic, low-volume hosting plan.

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

#203

Post by ivanca »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #177
ivanca wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Ok I see your point; but I want to add that one of the reasons your old account has spam is because you don't use it; I don't know what algorithm they are using but it certainly relies on usability data; I don't know exactly but could be: what language you usually speak in; what hours of the day you receive and read important email, what subjects you read about, etc etc.

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

#204

Post by dragonwriter »

buro9 wrote: post #139
curveship wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

According to the announcement, if you've already selected the option to ask before displaying external content, when this feature rolls out to your account it will also default to set the new setting to ask before displaying external images.

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

#206

Post by johnward »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #16

So 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.

Basically the same thing they do with keyword (not provided). You can get the referring keyword via adwords but not analytics with organic search. So if you pay for adwords you can see what keywords your users are clicking but if you don't pay then no data for you. Google only cares about user privacy when they can sell the data.

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

#207

Post by jrockway »

mnutt wrote: post #200
raldi wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A clarification: GMail's proxy is in two pieces; your email client connects to GMail's CDN, but in order to load content from the origin it passes through a pool of servers in Mountain View. My guess is that the transcoding servers are all located there.

Why do you think the servers are in Mountain View?

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

#208

Post by anonymic »

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…

Google could technically do a similarity measure between images coming from similar links (or similarly worded emails) and then provide the cached version. But then advertisers could hide random information in the image (steganography), making two visually similar looking images but with dissimilar enough content, that Google will be have to up the ante. And so on and so forth.

But you are spot on them being "willfully dishonest". The way I look at it, they are at this point trying to push the barrier and see where users will protest enough that they need to roll-back.

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

#209

Post by mvanveen »

ceejayoz wrote: post #18
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…

In fairness, it's a partial privacy improvement - it masks IP and user agent, as well as repeat opens.

Google was already image caching external email images, IIRC. So as far as amount of raw information being leaked, I think today's feature launch represents a step backwards.
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