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Images Now Showing in Gmail

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Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#101

Post by stephenhuey »

alooPotato wrote: post #82

This proxying actually rolled out on December 3rd to most gmail.com users. We, Streak, happenned to launch an email tracking feature on the same day ( http://www.streak.com/email-tracking-in-gmail ). Here's what we've learned: - the proxying of requests only happens when a user is viewing the mail inside Gmail (i.e. gmail does not actually affect the message body, its just proxying at render time) - gmail only caches…

Thanks for the information! So if you want to display a dynamic image containing real-time information when the recipient opens the email, it will still work since Gmail only caches the image for a short time, right?

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#102

Post by dragonwriter »

finnh wrote: post #44
danielnr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just ran the same test and can confirm the results. Google will only load your image if you open the email, which means Google has just opted-in all users to mail receipts. I don't use any Google services outside of small tests like this, but it still makes me concerned for how this will affect the privacy of people I know.

"Email open" tracking just got a lot more reliable for all mass email & marketing automation vendors. On the flip side, those same solutions can no longer set a persistent cookie with the image, so persistent tracking based on the initial email open will stop working.

> "Email open" tracking just got a lot more reliable for all mass email & marketing automation vendors.

No, it didn't. If you had chosen the option to ask before displaying external content -- which existed and applied to non-image content and, without which selection, email-open tracking by external non-image content was already reliable -- then the new setting to ask before displaying external images is selected for you by default.

If you hadn't selected that option before, you weren't protected from "email open" tracking.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#103

Post by Aldo_MX »

This is relevant for email marketers:

  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 and you’ll be asked whether you want
  to see the images.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#105

Post by mike-cardwell »

Just tried this out with https://emailprivacytester.com/ - The proxy request only happened when I viewed the email. It came from 66.249.88.50 (google-proxy-66-249-88-50.google.com) and had the User-Agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7 (via ggpht.com)

I viewed the email using Firefox 26 on Debian.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#106

Post by cglace »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #85
keithwinstein wrote: post #29

[Update 2: I just tested with a newly-created Gmail account and the feature did not seem to have been rolled out to the new account yet.] [Update: I'm not sure when this feature will actually be rolled out. I think my test below automatically displayed the image because my own email address appears to be implicitly a whitelisted sender (even though "images from this sender are always displayed" doesn't appear for it)…

I appreciated the lack of pictures of large penises that accompanied spam. And of course the fact that you didn't get a tracking pixel fetched. So I wonder if they are going to fetch the image from their servers, cache it, and then show it. Cutting off a supply of information for email marketers, whom they will offer to supply 'opening' information for people who use the new Gmail Promotions feature. (ok that is a lo…

There is still a way to track opens for images but it is now impossible to detect device and location.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#107

Post by mjbraun »

spb wrote: post #21
mjbraun wrote: post #7

I'm curious if this will help spammers. AFAIK, loading a tracking pixel helps validate an email address as active (since, by design, bounce messages probably wouldn't make it back to the spammer), even if the recipient didn't otherwise respond to the message. AFAIK, "Validated" email address lists are worth more than unchecked lists and if Google is preloading images for valid accounts, then that seems to make valida…

However, if they make requests (that they don't necessarily have to keep) for images for all accounts (preloading on receive and not read), it does the opposite, which is a good thing.

The problem is, if the filename/URL is unique to the user like "spammersite.tld/images/50093825343.jpg" and 50093825343" is tied to my unique email, then on Gmail's download and caching of the image, they've validated my email. If another email has 023503850485.jpg, gmail wouldn't know that the underlying file is the same unless it loads it. I don't even have to have checked my mail for this to happen.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#108

Post by macspoofing »

tehwebguy wrote: post #77
macspoofing wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the gmail proxy caches every image that is sent to a gmail address, then this bad for spammers, and good for everyone else. That's one less mechanism to verify valid (or active) email address.

I wonder if Google will access an image URL in an email sent to a nonexistent address

They almost have to, otherwise it would be much too easy to scrape gmail addresses (from Google itself!).

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#109

Post by chimeracoder »

alooPotato wrote: post #82

This proxying actually rolled out on December 3rd to most gmail.com users. We, Streak, happenned to launch an email tracking feature on the same day ( http://www.streak.com/email-tracking-in-gmail ). Here's what we've learned: - the proxying of requests only happens when a user is viewing the mail inside Gmail (i.e. gmail does not actually affect the message body, its just proxying at render time) - gmail only caches…

> - obviously you can encode some ID into the image URL itself but all that lets you do is identify the email address of the user that opened the email. But you already had their email address because you sent them an email - so again, no PII gets disclosed

This functions as a read receipt (like the tracking pixels).

The image might be cached later, but since it is initially loaded the first time an email with it is is opened, this means that implementing read receipts on all outgoing emails is as simple as making the URL for each image unique to the user.

Thus, the marketer knows:

1) That the email was opened 2) When the email was opened

along with whatever information they already have about the user.

This is a HUGE privacy implication. Even if "no [further] PII gets disclosed", it discloses a lot of information that is both sensitive and easy for marketers to join with existing identifying information.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#110

Post by twoodfin »

mratzloff wrote: post #80
twoodfin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tracking is currently only useful insofar as receiving a URL request for the image indicates that someone opened the email, as well as providing whatever metadata is available via the request, through geo-locating the request IP or what-have-you. This change makes all of that impossible: Google will (presumably) always request your image URL, whether the user opens the email or not, and the request will come from Goo…

> Google will (presumably) always request your image URL Why presumably?

Because relative to the quantity of email Gmail has to process, the images returned from tracking links are likely a drop in the bucket, and requesting them all provides their users with even better privacy protection than the "Show Images" toggle did.

If you want to be cynical, you can note that Google will still know which emails you opened and which you did not. Does the current Gmail TOS restrict them from selling that information to advertisers, or (more likely) using it to target ads? Probably not!

I suppose if they're clever, they'll figure out when a sender is serving a million copies of the same image to slightly altered URLs in the same email template, and forgo the requests, but either way, the sender loses the analytics.

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