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

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 322 posts

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

#211

Post by pre-show-mac »

dragonwriter wrote: post #204
buro9 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good info, cheers for that!

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

#212

Post by mcintyre1994 »

jfoster wrote: post #174
Dylan16807 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Unless they've somehow overlooked something, surely their terms of service will?

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

#213

Post by twakefield »

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…

I just did a quick test using Mailgun and recorded the results [1].

The TLDWatch is that Google does give you back the open event and they also give you the email address of the open since this data is encoded in the URL.

The data that is not accurate is what you would expect: IP address, geo-location and user-agent string.

We'll hopefully write a more extensive blog post shortly.

[1] http://blog.mailgun.com/post/gmail-open-tracking-test-at-mai...

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

#214

Post by thaumaturgy »

ivanca wrote: post #203
thaumaturgy wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, that could be. I have to spend a significant part of my time now dealing with spam (sysadmin), and Gmail's handling of spam is years ahead of most of the tools I have available.

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

#215

Post by eric_the_read »

curveship wrote: post #133
buro9 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

But if Google always fetches the images, then there's no way for the marketers to know if the email was actually opened or not.

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

#216

Post by drawkbox »

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 gets huge benefits from it but I think in the end this helps advertisers as well as still being able to track via the image url and a unique url/id. Good deals usually help both parties with some give and take.

Pros:

- Since all images flow through google, phishing and other malware attacks could be subverted.

- Images will be hosted faster in many cases (possibly less cost to run newsletters).

- Less connections on your server/cdn from multiples sources but google singularly.

- Still able to identify users legitimately but new users and newsletters will have more trouble getting your information initially.

Cons:

- Re-views later will not be tracked if out of cache, it will come from google the second time if is hasn't been purged (re-views are not big on newsletters anyways)

- Google getting all this data as well as your company

- The obvious 'national security' reasons

- Limited location and meta information

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

#217

Post by jfoster »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #212
jfoster wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Unless they've somehow overlooked something, surely their terms of service will?

The terms of service are an agreement with their users, not with third parties who are emailing their users.

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

#218

Post by jfoster »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #195
jfoster wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They're just acting as an email client. Alice sends email to Bob, Bob is granted rights to fetch and view images. Bob uses gmail, so he passes the rights onto google to do part of that serverside.

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think copyright law allows for Bob to pass on that right.

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

#219

Post by chris_mahan »

gdg92989 wrote: post #197
kllrnohj wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Selling eyeballs -- or information on how to get more eyeballs -- is what they do. Selling eyeballs: yes. Selling information: oh good lord no, so very, very no. That information is never ever leaving Google's servers.

Until the NSA gets to it.

Or until, years and years from now, someone buys Google.

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

#220

Post by malandrew »

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…

I would hope that they cache the images before delivery to any inbox regardless of whether the inbox exists or not.
Post reply on HN