What is e-mail marketing? this is a serious question. As someone who has nothing to do with marketing, advertising and all that stuff for me "e-mail marketing" is just spam. or what is it? newsletters? Does it mean that you buy mail addresses from someone and send your stuff to them and see if someone opens it?
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
#272What is e-mail marketing? this is a serious question. As someone who has nothing to do with marketing, advertising and all that stuff for me "e-mail marketing" is just spam. or what is it? newsletters? Does it mean that you buy mail addresses from someone and send your stuff to them and see if someone opens it?
It's when people subscribe to your email lists and you send them marketing messages. For example, you might sign up to an email newsletter from a shop you go to, and they will send you emails with marketing messages (sales/new products etc.)
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
Now google has the data, and they almost defaulted the option for everyone. That gives them a big boost in data receives which they could use for marketing "(hey guys you remember you got × amount of image loads, we made your images get loaded by × more users now if you want the data we got it right here for the right price.)"
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#274> 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/gma…
> The data that is not accurate is what you would expect: IP address, geo-location and user-agent string.
Also any cookies present in the user's local environment from other actions (images from the same ad network in other emails or from visiting web pages that use the same ad network) are not going to be sent, so tracking you between locations is going to be neutered somewhat.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why shouldn't content providers be free to monitor usage if it's legal and easy to do? Would you next start to argue SaaS providers shouldn't have any Web server logs at all since it's a way of "tracking" users?
If I choose to visit a website hosted by a server operated by someone else, that server is involved and can do whatever it wants. If a piece of content is delivered to me via the mail, I should be able to open a cached version as many times as I want without any request to the remote server. And the cached version can be built for me by my mail system, which by ALWAYS fetching the resources protects me. As a question…
If a piece of content is delivered to me via the mail, I should be able to open a cached version as many times as I want without any request to the remote server. And the cached version can be built for me by my mail system, which by ALWAYS fetching the resources protects me.
Agreed, and not even the server has to do that, any good e-mail client could (as it seems Gmail is now starting to do).
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#276I'm not a technical person so forgive me if this is a silly question but would X-Forwarded-For help maintain tracking with this change?
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#277> 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…
"Absurdly wrong, ....,and Google has no way to know that all of those point to the same image."
I think the guys who implemented image search has better ways to figure this out.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#278Can it be opted out by the user?
According to reports, the inverse question is now asked on the email header.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
The two of you are confused. The image link doesn't even have to return an image in order to successfully send information to marketers. An image link in the email to: http://thisalways404s.com/404/slg_read_my_email will work just fine. So, Google will follow the link and compare the files and... wait a second, the information we care about - that slg read my email - has already been transmitted.
Unless they did it at the time of mail arrival in order to better compare and save on loading times. In which case the information would be useless.
They are unlikely to do that though: it would waste a lot of bandwidth requesting images that users are never doing to see because they'll delete the mail before opening it. Google may have bandwidth and server resources to cobble dogs with, but they are not going to waste it like that I assume. Also if they did you could easily perform a DoS attack (or just give someone a big bandwidth bill) by sending out a pile of email with an image tag pointing to a large object on a competitor's web servers.
Re: Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
#280The EU Antitrust Ogre is surely grumbling about this...