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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

#311

Post by ukd1 »

vladtaltos wrote: post #285
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…

> 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 image. wrong. you can of course do simple image processing and identify similar images. if the marketers only change the name(url) of the file and not the content one-bit, you can trivially compare the hash of the file... even if the marketers change content, assuming…

And how do you get the image to compare it? By requesting it, which means you have to ask for it from a server, thus identifying that the image has been loaded.

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

#312

Post by mcintyre1994 »

jfoster wrote: post #217
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they've somehow overlooked something, surely their terms of service will?

The terms of service are an agreement with their users, not with third parties who are emailing their users.

I see where you're coming from, and IANAL etc, but this surely must be a solved problem? For at least the last 15 years (longer?) we've had web mail where mail you send doesn't go directly to the user but via some other servers. If there is an actual issue here it's going to be a hell of a legal battle.

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

#313

Post by bo1024 »

azakai wrote: post #24
bo1024 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mmm, it sounds like Google might deduplicate the images....

I thought that at first too, but to deduplicate, they still need to first issue a request for each, download, and compare. So the requests have already been made, and the marketer received their information.

If you request every image (regardless of if the email was opened) and then dedup, then I don't think the marketers get much info.

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

#314

Post by rspeer »

ceejayoz wrote: post #101
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…

> But (as they point out) in the "Dear " case they'll still have to show the right image to the right user. They could do a "This sender appears to be attempting to track you. We have disabled images as a precaution. Click here to load." Scary enough to the average user it'd probably kill the the technique very quickly.

Nah, nobody pays attention to warnings attached to Gmail messages after having seen so many of them.

A particular example of crying wolf that comes to mind is the yellow box that says, "HEY! THIS SENDER ISN'T WHO THEY SAY THEY ARE!", which usually means that someone just forwards their .edu address to Gmail.

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

#315

Post by tjoff »

drawkbox wrote: post #216
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…

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…

Fewer destination IPs is not a pro.

Also, google already has this data so why is that a con?

There is no national security reason.

Bottom line: Christmas came early for spammers this year.

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

#316

Post by tjoff »

leephillips wrote: post #113
ben0x539 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how that helps. If I send an email to user_x@gmail.com with an embedded image at http://example.com/my_spam_images/image_for_user_x.jpg and google makes a request to that, I know the mail has been delivered and the user in question exists and is seeing my ads, because a request for image_for_user_x.jpg showed up in my logs. Now, when user_y also receives my spam and I get a request for image_for_us…

"I know the mail has been delivered and the user in question exists and is seeing my ads" No, you just know that the email was delivered to the user's inbox. You don't know if the user looked at it or just trashed it.

That is way more information than they should ever get.

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

#317

Post by bluecalm »

kllrnohj wrote: post #184
mattdeboard wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's an advertising company. Selling eyeballs -- or information on how to get more eyeballs -- is what they do.

> Selling eyeballs -- or information on how to get more eyeballs -- is what they do. Selling eyeballs: yes. Selling information: oh good lord no, so very, very no. That information is never ever leaving Google's servers.

If it leaves or doesn't leave Google servers we can't really know but the facts are: -Google has this information -They are marketing company with incentives to monetize it

Imo it's enough to be a bad thing. We can't rely on good will of companies to fight incentives and money in the name of privacy of their users.

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

#318

Post by kllrnohj »

bluecalm wrote: post #317
kllrnohj wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Selling eyeballs -- or information on how to get more eyeballs -- is what they do. Selling eyeballs: yes. Selling information: oh good lord no, so very, very no. That information is never ever leaving Google's servers.

If it leaves or doesn't leave Google servers we can't really know but the facts are: -Google has this information -They are marketing company with incentives to monetize it Imo it's enough to be a bad thing. We can't rely on good will of companies to fight incentives and money in the name of privacy of their users.

You don't have to rely on "good will". Even if you are super pessimistic "companies only want money", Google will never sell or give up that data to other companies. That data is literally Google's lifeblood. That data is why companies use AdSense to advertise with instead of Bing Ads. That data is Google's competitive edge.

Even the evilest of companies isn't going to sell off its competitive edge, that's just idiotic.

Also you are wrong, Google is not a marketing company. Google is a middle man company. Google matches marketers to consumers. THAT is Google's business. Google is paid to be a match maker, nothing more.

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

#320

Post by jaxn »

vidarh wrote: post #171
jaxn wrote: post #86

Earlier 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.

We manage opt-in mailing lists for customers of restaurant chains, and for well timed, well-targeted campaigns they get open rates in the 30%-40% range with the majority of opens within 15-30 minutes of the send anyway. It takes more resources for us to handle the outbound mail load than to handle the inbound image requests, as for the image requests the url's contains enough info to do a trivial regexp based rewrite…

Just curious, how big are those lists? There is a big difference in a restaurant with 10,000 customers and an e-commerce site with 3,000,000.
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