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

arstechnica.com

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

#291

Post by ithkuil »

buro9 wrote: post #103
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…

> 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…

> Convenience and features over security and privacy

I don't understand. It probably has to do with the Zeitgeist.

The images were originally blocked because of security and privacy concerns.

Rendering of images is potentially insecure because of bugs in the browsers. By proxying the images, Google as an webmail provider, screens you from your browser bugs. Solved.

Rendering of images is a privacy concern because of tracking. By fetching the images from another place, the attacker cannot know your location, your OS, language setting, etc... Solved.

Rendering the image allow checking when and if the email is ever opened, which can be useful in marketing^Wspam primarily because they can understand whether an email is active/exists or not. Not Solved.

The latter however is a general problem. There are many other ways to know whether an email account exists or not. Many mail servers respond with bounce emails anyway. They won't bounce on detected spam, but that's not the point; this feature is an additional barrier for image tracking for content that has passed through the spam filter already.

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

#292

Post by 300bps »

EGreg wrote: post #128
300bps wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is ONE way: fetch every single image right away regardless of whether the email is even valid. And then don't store the cached version if there is no valid email. Otherwise store it and display to the user. Sure, in theory that works. In practice, you make an easy may to do a Denial of Service attack against Google or innocent third parties so it in actuality would never work. Send a million emails to Gmail acc…

Google does SPAM filtering and has no obligation to deliver those messages. It can throttle its acceptance of messages from the same IP block. How is this different than any other (distributed) DNS attack mitigation?

It can throttle its acceptance of messages from the same IP block

There are literally tens of millions of computers infected with malware making them part of a botnet (ex: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0629/Biggest-ever-criminal...). The cost to hire 1 million of these computers (all with unique IP addresses) to send emails out is trivial. You'd be shocked how cheap it is.

Now here's the thing... SPAM is pretty easy to spot because someone is trying to sell something. In this case, you're not trying to sell anything. You just need Google to download things. So you send an email with "Vacation Pics" in it. Sure, Google could filter them out but they're all from unique IP addresses from home computers across the country/world and they aren't trying to sell anything. They probably could filter out some of them at the cost of filtering out a lot of false positive legitimate mail.

Internet security is complex - you seem to think otherwise.

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

#293

Post by josteink »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #290
josteink wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect this is a UX anti-pattern. I've gone back into my settings and changed it back Gmail has done this enough times around already for to me become a UX anti-pattern in itself. It's weird to look back to the days people were begging for invites and Gmail was the best game in town. These days the few times I'm forced to use GMail it almost makes me rage. The "normal users" I know which are forced to cope with…

To what did you migrate?

I moved to fastmail which I found wildly refreshing. In the same sense I found Gmail refreshing when it first was launched.

Once you try using fastmail, you will be surprised by how incredibly lightweight it is. When you first get used to that, trying to use Gmail feels like wrestling a horribly bloated pig. The UX has just become terrible.

As for fastmail or other options... I was very keen on being able to host things 100% myself, preferably using FOSS, because of privacy concerns and being in control of my own data.

After trying out various FOSS (and non-FOSS) solutions I decided none of them were good enough/polished enough for my needs.

In that regard fastmail is a compromise for me compared to what I ultimately want, but it's a compromise I'm more than happy with.

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

#294

Post by ithkuil »

hrjet wrote: post #287
ithkuil wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no advantage of prefetching images from familiar senders. It's not about faster image loading. The ideal thing would be to just prefetch all the images sent to existing and non existing accounts. This way there is absolutely no way for a spammer to tell whether an email is existing or not.

> There is no advantage of prefetching images from familiar senders. The advantages I had in mind were: 1. No leak of user IP address, cookies, etc 2. No leak of timing information (when user opened the email). It will however leak that the email address is valid, which might be a fine compromise with a selected subset of senders.

Sorry, I wasn't precise. I was responding to the suggestion to only proxy for familiar senders. But, assuming that you can correctly identify who is familiar and who's not (there is scam detection as well), the benefit is minimal.

There is bigger benefit of doing this proxy for non-familiar emails.

Google could prevent leaking if email address is valid by simply prefetching images even when email is sent on non existent accounts.

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

#295

Post by JimDabell »

Silhouette wrote: post #201
Nacraile wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

This is an old problem with an old solution. If you have an expensive-to-generate resource that you don't want automatically retrieved en masse, you use robots.txt to deny access to it.

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

#296

Post by c_magg »

I understand why this feature was implemented. This feature is less private than not showing images. However, the general population cares more about convenience than security or privacy. What I don't understand is why they couldn't give me a "No thanks" option. Why am I automatically opt in? A "no thanks" button would not hinder the usability for those who care more about convenience than security, and it would allow people who are concerned about privacy to continue browsing as they always have.

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

#297

Post by ErikAugust »

notatoad wrote: post #238
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

True. A lot of marketing emails also tend to be sorted there.

I wonder if the Promotions tab gets a lot of attention from users? I archive everything in there as fast as possible.

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

#298

Post by BrokenEnso »

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.

Sounds like a great way to verify an email address to me. Send an email with a tracking image and if you get a hit, presuming they pre-fetch, you know it's a valid email.

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

#299

Post by wjk »

c_magg wrote: post #296

I understand why this feature was implemented. This feature is less private than not showing images. However, the general population cares more about convenience than security or privacy. What I don't understand is why they couldn't give me a "No thanks" option. Why am I automatically opt in? A "no thanks" button would not hinder the usability for those who care more about convenience than security, and it would allo…

Please explain why you seem to think that this is less private than not showing images.

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

#300

Post by webjprgm »

anatari wrote: post #265
codeflo wrote: post #44

Earlier 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.)

Although I'm sure it's possible to fool their image hashing algorithm, I doubt this will. Image hashing algorithms are designed to be resistant to small changes in the image and more advanced ones can generate hashes that determine how similar one image is to another. I haven't tried this, but you can probably see a proof of this using google image search. Add some text to an image, and see if Google image search can…

Procedurally generated fractal backgrounds with random seed, that might work?

Anyway, I think it would be perfectly fine if Google matched up emails with similar content and where there was one image that was unique for everybody just remove it, maybe with a note to the user in that case.

Do NOT have a "click to load images" button. If users can't ever see them then it completely destroys spammers' ability to use them even for a rough sampling.

I would love to see spam as an advertising method be completely destroyed. It won't be, because even without tracking it is still easy and useful to spam out lots of ads, but this would help.

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