A side effect of this is you will never be able to send images to someone as a cut/paste if they are behind http auth since google can't log in and see them.
Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
221–230 of 322 posts
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#222Oh 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)...
Yes, this is a good idea, hotmail should do the same to promote whatever MS is promoting ATM.
To be fair, MS's "new image format" (JPEG XR) actually seems quite a bit better than Google's "new image format" (WebP)...
JPEG XR actually adds significant features like OpenEXR- and radiance-compatible HDR encoding, whereas WebP is basically the same old 1980s functionality with better compression.
So while there's something slightly sketchy about doing this, I'd say the world would benefit more from MS doing it than from Google doing it...
[I use gmail and other Google stuff, and have an Android phone, and generally hate MS, but it's very hard to be enthusiastic about WebP...]
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#223holy 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.
Google is a corporation. Everything they do is to make money. The images they're caching aren't mine, anyway, and in many cases they're unsolicited. Sure there's the evil aspect to this (they own advertising), but there is the potential good of obfuscating your actually private data - the IP you check your mail from, when you check it, anything you send back with an HTTP request - from marketers. On solely that note,…
But in many cases they are solicited, and people want the behavior that gets triggered by knowing about opens:
You always opens our offer e-mails? We'll send you more of the same of what you open, and less of what you don't, increasing the chance you'll find something you like.
Stopping web-bugs from the spammers will improved things, but stopping it from legitimate opt-in marketing mails will make the experience worse and less targeted for people.
The company I work for send millions of e-mails on behalf of customers. All opt-in, and I spend far more time than I'd like making sure we comply with all expectations of the mail providers and ISPs...
But I'm all for Google proxying and hiding IP, cookies etc - I wrote a webmail solution back in the day, and co-founded a company to run it, and frankly I pretty much assumed Google did this already; we did that back in '99 because it was the obvious thing to do.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
For the same reason Starbucks grows all its coffee in Seattle.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And then you can cause Google to DDoS someone else's site by sending out spam containing lots of image URLs.
You can somewhat do this with the current system. I had no problems sending an email with 10 10mb images. Google happily fetched all 10 of the images off my server.
Not sure if they limit it at some point, but if a server accepts urls such as:
http://i.imgur.com/9Y5FDz7.jpg http://i.imgur.com/9Y5FDz7.jpg?1 http://i.imgur.com/9Y5FDz7.jpg?2 etc...
Google would fetch each separately. Send this out to a bunch of people, and it seems problematic. I'm going to be optimistic, and assume they built in some sort of limiting, but who knows.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I set up some servers in the US and Asia and had some images proxied to them through GMail's proxy. The traceroute paths and latencies from the requesting IPs lead me to believe that the servers were in the US, most likely Mountain View.
I probably shouldn't have asserted Mountain View, as it's more of an educated guess.
Edit: here's a traceroute from Hong Kong to the Google server that made the proxy request. Is there a flaw in this method?
@hongkong:~# traceroute 66.249.88.203
traceroute to 66.249.88.203 (66.249.88.203), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 119.9.72.2 (119.9.72.2) 1.168 ms 1.130 ms 1.122 ms
2 119.9.64.64 (119.9.64.64) 1.092 ms 1.058 ms 1.052 ms
3 vl902.edge3.hkg1.rackspace.net (120.136.47.19) 1.307 ms 1.205 ms 1.304 ms
4 RHI-0001.gw2.hkg3.asianetcom.net (203.192.178.65) 1.169 ms 1.148 ms 1.123 ms
5 google.gw2.hkg3.asianetcom.net (203.192.178.30) 1.782 ms 1.755 ms 1.741 ms
6 209.85.248.62 (209.85.248.62) 6.716 ms 209.85.248.60 (209.85.248.60) 17.183 ms 209.85.248.62 (209.85.248.62) 2.105 ms
7 66.249.94.31 (66.249.94.31) 81.019 ms 80.999 ms 80.966 ms
8 64.233.175.1 (64.233.175.1) 53.256 ms 53.077 ms 53.060 ms
9 209.85.245.206 (209.85.245.206) 72.528 ms 72.488 ms 72.14.239.55 (72.14.239.55) 80.903 ms
10 209.85.242.89 (209.85.242.89) 150.251 ms 148.859 ms 64.233.174.176 (64.233.174.176) 149.147 ms
11 72.14.239.80 (72.14.239.80) 215.363 ms 215.368 ms 72.14.239.82 (72.14.239.82) 201.955 ms
12 209.85.249.45 (209.85.249.45) 223.694 ms 72.14.237.119 (72.14.237.119) 211.817 ms 212.567 ms
13 64.233.174.117 (64.233.174.117) 212.505 ms 216.239.48.103 (216.239.48.103) 215.874 ms 213.109 ms
14 * * *
15 google-proxy-66-249-88-203.google.com (66.249.88.203) 211.877 ms 212.484 ms 212.371 msRe: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
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…
Or just cache unique images on delivery...
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#228So how does this affect various email template applications such as Tout or Hubspot's Signals? IIRC Tout drops a pixel in each email and uses that as a primary tracking source for opens/CTRs etc...
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#229> 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 connecti…
> 'national security' reasons
Which?
The email already has the image URL. What extra leak is there if Google fetches the image?
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#230So 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.
Google is starting to emulate the bullying tactics of Microsoft during its hey day. Don't be evil. not so much, I say.