5 ms·

if you were a large email service and you really wanted to mess with this sort of tracking could you - fetch the images at the point the mail is accepted for

if you were a large email service and you really wanted to mess with this sort of tracking could you - fetch the images at the point the mail is accepted for delivery - cache the result - rewrite the URLs transparently in the UI to point to your cached copy

legitster 5y ago
This is already how Gmail handles images.
- mike-cardwell 5y ago
  No it's not. Gmail fetches images when you open an email to read it. You can test this yourself using https://www.emailprivacytester.com https://www.emailprivacytester.com. The only thing Gmail does is hide your IP when it fetches the image. It doesn't hide the fact that you've opened the email. Which frankly, is the most useful piece of information to the tracker.
  - legitster 5y ago
    The email privacy detector is seeing Google fetch the image. In the HTML of the email the sent me the image URL points to a Google proxy link. On subsequent opens of the email, the detector is not seeing the image being requested again. Unless you were proposing the email server should download and proxy ALL images, even before the email is delivered. Some anti-spam clients already do a version of this, although it should be noted that giving an email sender the signal that you are eagerly reading all of their emails may produce unintended consequences.
    - mike-cardwell 5y ago
      > Unless you were proposing the email server should download and proxy ALL images, even before the email is delivered. That is precisely what the OP proposed, and which you then stated is the way that gmail works. I then pointed out that gmail does not work that way. And you have now confirmed that. > giving an email sender the signal that you are eagerly reading all of their emails may produce unintended consequences. That's the whole point of this. The moment the big providers implement "fetch on delivery", there is no signal any more. The spammers wont suddenly think, "oh look, our spam campagain is going swimmingly. 100% of our gmail, hotmail and yahoo recipients are now opening our email", and then continue along oblivious of this new major change from all the main email providers, thinking that all of their email is being opened.
snowwrestler 5y ago
The majority of emails are never opened. So why would an email service greatly increase their complexity and costs by downloading images no one would otherwise ever see, storing them indefinitely, and rewriting their customers’ email content. The risk/reward ratio is way off on that. I wonder how many customers would welcome the feature announcement “we are now programmatically altering the content of emails you receive through us.” Look how well everyone loved it when ISPs injected content into unencrypted web pages they delivered.
- mike-cardwell 5y ago
  > The majority of emails are never opened. So why would an email service greatly increase their complexity and costs by downloading images no one would otherwise ever see If gmail and some of the other large providers started doing this, people would just stop using tracking pixels because they would no longer work. So less stuff for gmail to proxy. Then emails would only contain "legit" images, which would be shared across many emails. e.g, you send 100,000 emails with an image that has no tracking information, gmail only needs to downloads it once. And why would a sender choose to serve 100,000 copies of the same image from slightly different URLs, when they can just serve it up once? The gains are obvious and would be large if you ask me. The scale of the costs, debatable, imo.
  - snowwrestler 5y ago
    > why would a sender choose to serve 100,000 copies of the same image from slightly different URLs, when they can just serve it up once? To provide open tracking, which is a core metric that all of their customers demand and rely on. There is nothing special about a tracking pixel, it’s just a tiny image file with a personalized URL. Email marketing platforms could easily personalize the URLs of other image files or even all image files. The costs are asymmetric. The sender only needs one copy of the image file, and a tiny bit of code to map the personalized URLs to that file. But the receiving platform would have to cache every copy of the image separately since they would all have different URLs. Or run some sort deduping scheme across all inboxes and emails, which would also be expensive.

legitster 5y ago

This is already how Gmail handles images.

mike-cardwell 5y ago
No it's not. Gmail fetches images when you open an email to read it. You can test this yourself using https://www.emailprivacytester.com https://www.emailprivacytester.com. The only thing Gmail does is hide your IP when it fetches the image. It doesn't hide the fact that you've opened the email. Which frankly, is the most useful piece of information to the tracker.
- legitster 5y ago
  The email privacy detector is seeing Google fetch the image. In the HTML of the email the sent me the image URL points to a Google proxy link. On subsequent opens of the email, the detector is not seeing the image being requested again. Unless you were proposing the email server should download and proxy ALL images, even before the email is delivered. Some anti-spam clients already do a version of this, although it should be noted that giving an email sender the signal that you are eagerly reading all of their emails may produce unintended consequences.
  - mike-cardwell 5y ago
    > Unless you were proposing the email server should download and proxy ALL images, even before the email is delivered. That is precisely what the OP proposed, and which you then stated is the way that gmail works. I then pointed out that gmail does not work that way. And you have now confirmed that. > giving an email sender the signal that you are eagerly reading all of their emails may produce unintended consequences. That's the whole point of this. The moment the big providers implement "fetch on delivery", there is no signal any more. The spammers wont suddenly think, "oh look, our spam campagain is going swimmingly. 100% of our gmail, hotmail and yahoo recipients are now opening our email", and then continue along oblivious of this new major change from all the main email providers, thinking that all of their email is being opened.

snowwrestler 5y ago

The majority of emails are never opened. So why would an email service greatly increase their complexity and costs by downloading images no one would otherwise ever see, storing them indefinitely, and rewriting their customers’ email content. The risk/reward ratio is way off on that. I wonder how many customers would welcome the feature announcement “we are now programmatically altering the content of emails you receive through us.” Look how well everyone loved it when ISPs injected content into unencrypted web pages they delivered.

mike-cardwell 5y ago
> The majority of emails are never opened. So why would an email service greatly increase their complexity and costs by downloading images no one would otherwise ever see If gmail and some of the other large providers started doing this, people would just stop using tracking pixels because they would no longer work. So less stuff for gmail to proxy. Then emails would only contain "legit" images, which would be shared across many emails. e.g, you send 100,000 emails with an image that has no tracking information, gmail only needs to downloads it once. And why would a sender choose to serve 100,000 copies of the same image from slightly different URLs, when they can just serve it up once? The gains are obvious and would be large if you ask me. The scale of the costs, debatable, imo.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  > why would a sender choose to serve 100,000 copies of the same image from slightly different URLs, when they can just serve it up once? To provide open tracking, which is a core metric that all of their customers demand and rely on. There is nothing special about a tracking pixel, it’s just a tiny image file with a personalized URL. Email marketing platforms could easily personalize the URLs of other image files or even all image files. The costs are asymmetric. The sender only needs one copy of the image file, and a tiny bit of code to map the personalized URLs to that file. But the receiving platform would have to cache every copy of the image separately since they would all have different URLs. Or run some sort deduping scheme across all inboxes and emails, which would also be expensive.