4 ms·

"hidden images" don't work with most clients. I guess it was some link with a token they were clicking.

• andyjohnson0 11y ago
  See [1] for a description of how the tracking works - scroll down to "So how does that tracking work?". It appears to use embedded links to message-specific 0-by-0 pixel remote images. [1] http://www.ghacks.net/2014/02/22/can-streak-really-track-gmail-emails-read/ http://www.ghacks.net/2014/02/22/can-streak-really-track-gma...
  • frgewut 11y ago
    "Whenever a user opens the email without proper protection" is the caveat here.
    • peteretep 11y ago
      Someone posted a site they'd built recently that would send you an email with all the nasty tracking tricks in them, and let you see which your client fell for. I was sad to see gmail choked on most of it.
      • rhaps0dy 11y ago
        Well, I am very happy to see that OS X's Mail.app with remote content disabled does not trigger a single one of them.
      • hotcool 11y ago
        No need to feel sad. People who use Gmail likely aren't concerned about privacy anyway.
      • garblegarble 11y ago
        I just tested gmail with emailprivacytester and it didn't fall for any of them (and only fell for the image tags when I clicked a button to allow images in the e-mail to be displayed) so they may have beefed things up in response to that site
      • sp332 11y ago
        Make sure to check that the IP addresses are yours. Gmail loads images to their own servers and then serves them to your Gmail UI from there, so trackers shouldn't get your actual IP.
      • dannysu 11y ago
        I wrote a blog post about this for iOS apps: https://dannysu.com/2015/12/11/best-ios-email-apps-for-privacy/ https://dannysu.com/2015/12/11/best-ios-email-apps-for-priva... If you're on mobile, basically majority of the apps out there suck at this. You need to turn image loading off by default and then Gmail, built-in Mail, and FastMail are the only ones that pass.
    • porker 11y ago
      If anyone can identify the site peteretep mentions, eternal gratitude: I want to test it.
      • davecardwell 11y ago
        https://emailprivacytester.com/ https://emailprivacytester.com/ by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mike-cardwell https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mike-cardwell
  • rpgmaker 11y ago
    Didn't google started to host copies of images referenced in gmail a while back though? This should make this method useless for a lot of email addresses.
• monsieurbanana 11y ago
  What about non-hidden images with a token?