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A Google security engineer confirmed to me that Google toyed with this idea but ultimately decided not to do it due to various partners not wishing to lose the
by Sephr 8y ago
A Google security engineer confirmed to me that Google toyed with this idea but ultimately decided not to do it due to various partners not wishing to lose the ability to perform read receipt tracking.
There are no unsolved technical reasons preventing this from being enabled in Gmail, only political reasons.
- Jach 8y agoHuh, I was under the impression that Google started doing this years ago and didn't stop, and even tied it into spam analysis... Did your contact elaborate on the extent of their "toying" and any timelines? I guess I'll have to revisit some of my arguments -- a few years ago I successfully fought against adding a tracking pixel to an email template on the basis of read receipt hits not being valid hits a lot of the time (let alone never getting a hit despite being read due to images being off) due to providers like gmail pre-loading them (sometimes more than once at random times), so we should just use click-through metrics on links when the request comes with an authentication cookie.
- Sephr 8y agoGoogle proxies and caches all external assets in emails through their own servers to hide your IP address, but they only do this on-read instead of on-delivery, which enables read receipt tracking.