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

231–240 of 322 posts

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

#231

Post by nly »

codeflo wrote: post #44
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,…

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.)

And Google could just mark any mail from sources who pull these shenanigans as spam

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

#232

Post by agotterer »

if you had a Gmail folder named "Ars Technica" and loaded e-mail images, the referral URL would be "https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#label/Ars+Technica"—the folder is right there in the URL

That just isn't true on gmail. The whole service is served over https and won't pass referral information.

Not to mention your IP and whatever other information they feel like embedded in links will still passed along when you click. So theres still some tracking going on, but they miss out on open without action emails (which is of course useful information to marketers).

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

#233

Post by TillE »

austinhutch wrote: post #127
warfangle wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future of marketing is forming cohesive communities with your customers, anyways, not spamming the shit out of them.

What does a "cohesive community" look like and is anyone doing this today?

Indie/small/medium-sized videogame studios with forums.

Alternatively, if you're not the sort of company that naturally engenders an active community, Twitter. It's not perfect, but it's a far better experience for customers who may want to keep up with what you're doing but don't want a new email to delete every week.

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

#234

Post by maxmcd »

waps wrote: post #192
3JPLW wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative to "OK" is "Settings," with a link that just dumps you into the main settings view… leaving you to find the Images section to change it back. Quite an opt-in.

Otoh, this makes it harder for email marketers and generally other people to see if I'm reading their mail. +1

"Want to see if your users are opening their emails? Pay to display your message in gmail's promotions tab."

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

#235

Post by backlava »

EGreg wrote: post #81
surrealize wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you saying Google will try to guess and reconstruct "Dear Marge" in the same font as "Dear John" instead of requesting both from the origin server?

Getting the font right is the easy part. Figuring out the formerly occluded pixels in the background image is the hard part.

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

#236

Post by aiiane »

Steuard wrote: post #99
necubi wrote: post #19

There seems to be a lot of misinformation flying around. Here's [0] Google's support doc that clears up some of it. The most important part is at the end: "In some cases, senders may be able to know whether an individual has opened a message with unique image links. As always, Gmail scans every message for suspicious content and if Gmail considers a sender or message potentially suspicious, images won’t be displayed…

Wow, I'm amazed by this. I was convinced that Google wouldn't have rolled out this new feature unless they had a way to avoid this sort of tracking. Isn't this exactly the privacy issue that led clients to adopt "Don't display images automatically by default" in the first place? (Why wouldn't they let users combine this behavior with the old one? That is, don't display images by default, but if you choose to display…

Actually, the most serious reason (and the reason why not displaying images was introduced in the first place for unknown senders) was the potential for exploits triggered via embedded images, e.g. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/09/17/exploit_for_mic... or even just using it to bypass firewalls by having someone inside an organization execute a GET request (via img src=) from a browser inside the firewall. (P.S. This is one reason why write operations should always use POST...)

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

#237

Post by jtheory »

vidarh wrote: post #176
pramodliv1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure this already exists -- I've gotten spam with obviously random noise, lines, etc. added to the background.

My assumption is that it's making the images unique.

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

#238

Post by notatoad »

ErikAugust wrote: post #50

Speculation: how many steps away are we from some sort of AdWords for mass emailing?

Gmail already delivers paid advertisements through the promotions tab. I'm sure Google gives those advertisers plenty of metrics

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

#239

Post by jtheory »

waps wrote: post #192
3JPLW wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative to "OK" is "Settings," with a link that just dumps you into the main settings view… leaving you to find the Images section to change it back. Quite an opt-in.

Otoh, this makes it harder for email marketers and generally other people to see if I'm reading their mail. +1

If you go to the trouble to figure out how to disable the "auto-load images" setting, then they're just as blocked as before.

If you accept the new default, it's far easier for them to track you, because Google will kindly be loading their tracking images on your behalf when you open the email, every time.

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

#240

Post by durrrrrrr »

From the google post about why they don't display images by default: "We did this to protect you from unknown senders who might try to use images to compromise the security of your computer or mobile device."

Surely it's this same technology google themselves use more than anyone else to identify users?

Post reply on HN