301–310 of 322 posts
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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
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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.)
So 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...
Cool. So it used to be the case that my AdBlock configuration got to filter the image loads in gmail, and now... not so much. Thanks, Google!
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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.
Do you think copyright law disallows running your desktop in the cloud?
> 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…
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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. Since every result will be a positive - false or not - no information is revealed to the marketer AND the images are displayed.
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…
Attacks on third parties are trickier, but you can do the same sort of thing today; how often is this tactic used already? And can't you download 404 messages yourself for cheaper than 1k?
> 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…
But if the images are pre-cached before the user opens it, there is still no way of knowing the E-mail was read.
Unless the image is cached upon opening, which is a bit counter-intuitive.
> 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…
> and Google has no way to know that all of those point to the same image. They could do content hash-based caching rather than URL-based caching. It would be more private, as the email senders would have to generate a unique image for each recipient.