281–290 of 322 posts
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Hmm - so we can flood Google's cache by sending an email full of links to procedurally generated images?
You'd never win that race.
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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.
A dialog popped up when I logged into email, and before I'd seen this thread. That dialog was much along the lines of "We'll now show you images in your email automatically." with a big "OK" button. I don't recall whether there was a less prominent "No, thanks" as I was only logging on to reply to one question really quickly. I suspect this is a UX anti-pattern. I've gone back into my settings and changed it back to…
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 Gmail are constantly and consistenly confused, asking me where things they used to know have gone, and why Google is ruining Gmail.
Glad I migrated to something better, somewhere where I know for a fact that I am the customer, not the product.
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Apparently Google does not always fetch the images. But even if they did, this is still more information leakage than the old default (don't load images). Spammers who email via botnets and the like, with false return addresses, doesn't get bouncebacks to clean their lists. But if you (or Google, on your behalf) give them a hand by reliably loading their tracking image, that flags your email as a valid one. If you we…
An alternative could be to let the user decide if Gmail should prefetch images from a sender or not. Email from familiar senders would have images prefetched (thus avoiding leaks of user data). And DDOSing concerns would be reduced because those emails would not be from a familiar source.
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.
Remote address: 66.249.x.x [any google ip]
Referer: [not set]
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)
> 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…
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 the marketer sent the image %90 same and 10% customized per person, you can borrow techniques from image compression domain to compress this humongous data very efficiently.
There seems to be a lot of misinformation flying around. Here's [0] Google's support doc that clears up some of it. The most important part is at the end: "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…
I then reverted back to the old image settings but when I open unread messages now, they also have their images loaded automatically and without asking me.
Either the "revert back to original settings" are broken, or the caching of images is done when I enter my inbox, for all unread messages.
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An alternative could be to let the user decide if Gmail should prefetch images from a sender or not. Email from familiar senders would have images prefetched (thus avoiding leaks of user data). And DDOSing concerns would be reduced because those emails would not be from a familiar source.
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.
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.
This is what I'm seeing when testing it and found that all my tracking images (tracking pixel) have hits as below. Remote address: 66.249.x.x [any google ip] Referer: [not set] 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)
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As someone who co-invented email image bugs with a million other programmers over 15 years ago, you are absolutely correct. (for the curious, my reason for coming up with it was to tell when a customer who requested a car insurance quote from the company I worked at read their email which instantly initiated an outbound call to them). The entire article is just plain wrong. For instance: This move will allow Google t…
Google could check if GUID_1.jpg is the exact same image as GUID_2.jpg. If the same, just show a cached version. No more tracking. (of course, email marketers would thwart this by making each image slightly different. google would respond by checking if the images are almost exactly the same. repeat. whack-a-mole ad infinitum).
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A dialog popped up when I logged into email, and before I'd seen this thread. That dialog was much along the lines of "We'll now show you images in your email automatically." with a big "OK" button. I don't recall whether there was a less prominent "No, thanks" as I was only logging on to reply to one question really quickly. I suspect this is a UX anti-pattern. I've gone back into my settings and changed it back to…
> 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…