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Images Now Showing in Gmail

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Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#61

Post by danielnr »

nkoren wrote: post #54
finnh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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. Has it? If Google's proxy is caching images, then "email open" tracking might have broken entirely. All the sender would see is that their email has been opened once by the proxy -- for all gmail addresses put together.

http://example.com/trackingimage.php?email={yourusername}@gm...

Or, if they snip the GET variable for whatever reason (I don't see them doing this):

http://example.com/gmail/{yourusername}/trackingimage.php

Or even:

http://example.com/{emailidfromadatabase}/trackingimage.php

This tactic is already in use by most mass email companies.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#62

Post by dragonwriter »

seanalltogether wrote: post #46
anonsumus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you quite understand the changes here, no "read receipts" are sent, any analytics sent only point to the Google proxy processing the images, no individual recipients nor their actions are revealed. See how marketers are scrambling to adjust to this change: a.) Gmail is now requesting all images from proxy servers (googleusercontent.com), which incorrectly situates users in its headquarters in Mountain V…

I don't understand how a proxy will protect me from an image loaded as http://marketer.com/4b3403665fea6.jpg where that hash is used to link to my email address

> I don't understand how a proxy will protect me from an image loaded as

It will protect you from it being as a read receipt if (and I'm not sure if this is the case, though it should be trivial to test by sending email with images served from a site you control to an email you control without opening it) Google requests the image once it has received the email.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#63

Post by dingaling »

seanalltogether wrote: post #46
anonsumus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you quite understand the changes here, no "read receipts" are sent, any analytics sent only point to the Google proxy processing the images, no individual recipients nor their actions are revealed. See how marketers are scrambling to adjust to this change: a.) Gmail is now requesting all images from proxy servers (googleusercontent.com), which incorrectly situates users in its headquarters in Mountain V…

I don't understand how a proxy will protect me from an image loaded as http://marketer.com/4b3403665fea6.jpg where that hash is used to link to my email address

Now it will seem to the sender that 100% of e-mails sent to Gmail recipients have been opened, rendering actual measurement impossible. A unique ID is useless if all unique IDs are requested all the time.

I'm sure they built-in rate-limiting to prevent DDOSing the sender's image server...

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#64

Post by Wilya »

nkoren wrote: post #54
finnh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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. Has it? If Google's proxy is caching images, then "email open" tracking might have broken entirely. All the sender would see is that their email has been opened once by the proxy -- for all gmail addresses put together.

Mass-email senders probably would put a unique identifier in the image url (different for all users), so Google will open each image, because it can't know before loading them that it's the same image.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#66

Post by antr » 

    "Google’s own secure proxy servers"
will that mean that people who track me opening their email with 1px images won't be able to track that? I hope this is the case...

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#67

Post by mtrimpe »

Wilya wrote: post #64
nkoren wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Email open" tracking just got a lot more reliable for all mass email & marketing automation vendors. Has it? If Google's proxy is caching images, then "email open" tracking might have broken entirely. All the sender would see is that their email has been opened once by the proxy -- for all gmail addresses put together.

Mass-email senders probably would put a unique identifier in the image url (different for all users), so Google will open each image, because it can't know before loading them that it's the same image.

Or they could retrieve every image sent to a gmail address immediately, regardless of whether you viewed it or not.

That would essentially render open statistics meaningless and would let Google cripple another industry after the promotions tab and 'not provided.'

I really hope they don't because it's such valuable information when creating email copy...

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#68

Post by mtrimpe »

yajoe wrote: post #49
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)…

It's also weird that they didn't explain the how behind this line: > Instead of serving images directly from their original external host servers, Gmail will now serve all images through Google’s own secure proxy servers. In most cases, the unique identifiers are embedded in the URLs themselves, so simply serving through a proxy is ineffective. Should I blindly trust that you, Google, did the right thing? Edit: looks…

They'll probably retrieve and cache every image as soon as the email is received which would effectively render open statistics meaningless for GMail addresses.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#70

Post by swedegeek »

maxerickson wrote: post #47
swedegeek wrote: post #36

Yea, it's hard to not think this is ultimately not a great move. It seems rather shortsighted from a Gmail user's perspective if Google can't address concerns over spammers being able to verify email addresses, or even just analytic trackers. It is also vastly less appealing to hear that Google plans to cache all images, which we know Big Brother is grabbing as well. And in the case where someone may want to actually…

Aren't verified email addresses a relic of the past? Does anybody actually get anything other than nonsense spam anymore?

That feels a bit like the "I have nothing to hide argument." Should we just accept that probably spammers no longer send address verifying emails, and tacitly approve this change helping them out if they do? Ultimately, the default should be to let people decide for themselves to opt in to something like this. Forcing this with some pretty big head scratching holes in the benefits seems rather evil.
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