4 ms·

I always thought gmail requests the images whether you open the email or not since they moved to the image proxy in 2015 or so.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
I too recall hearing this, but email tracking definitely still works in Gmail, and Google, being the advertising and marketing king, has no incentive to upset their actual customers by defeating email tracking. (In fact, AMP4Email, a.k.a. "Dynamic Email", will probably make this even worse.) I suspect the thing we heard about means Gmail is messing up the IP address/location tracking aspect of a tracking pixel, but still loading it on email opens. The bargain of "we'll hide the user's IP, but still allow you to track their behavior" sounds like the devil's bargain I'm used to from them.
- robin_reala 6y ago
  AMP4Email was the trigger that turned me from a paying customer to de-Googling my life, so I guess I can be thankful for that at least.
- phreeza 6y ago
  Good to know, I disabled loading images now.
eli 6y ago
No, the proxy hides your IP, user agent, and cookies but it doesn't actually fetch the images until you open the message.
chimeracoder 6y ago
> I always thought gmail requests the images whether you open the email or not since they moved to the image proxy in 2015 or so. No. They request the image (through their proxies) the first time it's loaded. Only subsequent requests are loaded straight from the cache. That means that, if trackers send personalized tracking pixels (which literally all do), then they still know the first time you read the email. (The only thing that's changed is that they can't tell when you open it subsequent times, and they can't get location information and the like from your IP address). In exchange for taking location tracking away from marketing companies, they turned images on by default for Gmail users.

4 ms·

I always thought gmail requests the images whether you open the email or not since they moved to the image proxy in 2015 or so.

by phreeza 6y ago

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
I too recall hearing this, but email tracking definitely still works in Gmail, and Google, being the advertising and marketing king, has no incentive to upset their actual customers by defeating email tracking. (In fact, AMP4Email, a.k.a. "Dynamic Email", will probably make this even worse.) I suspect the thing we heard about means Gmail is messing up the IP address/location tracking aspect of a tracking pixel, but still loading it on email opens. The bargain of "we'll hide the user's IP, but still allow you to track their behavior" sounds like the devil's bargain I'm used to from them.
- robin_reala 6y ago
  AMP4Email was the trigger that turned me from a paying customer to de-Googling my life, so I guess I can be thankful for that at least.
- phreeza 6y ago
  Good to know, I disabled loading images now.
eli 6y ago
No, the proxy hides your IP, user agent, and cookies but it doesn't actually fetch the images until you open the message.
chimeracoder 6y ago
> I always thought gmail requests the images whether you open the email or not since they moved to the image proxy in 2015 or so. No. They request the image (through their proxies) the first time it's loaded. Only subsequent requests are loaded straight from the cache. That means that, if trackers send personalized tracking pixels (which literally all do), then they still know the first time you read the email. (The only thing that's changed is that they can't tell when you open it subsequent times, and they can't get location information and the like from your IP address). In exchange for taking location tracking away from marketing companies, they turned images on by default for Gmail users.