5 ms·

I thought Google loaded all content from all external sources upon your seat, so the sender doesn't know whether you opened it or not.

DaiPlusPlus 1y ago
That still tells the sender it’s a valid email address though?
- cxr 1y ago
  > I've noticed that moving the goalposts is extremely prevalent on HN, which makes for pretty frustrating conversations (or just reading). And then sometimes it's a tag team[…] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117242>
  - ASalazarMX 1y ago
    Politicians are masters of this tactic of deflection. The nastier, the better they are at it. Calling it out is the best one can do without getting trapped in a cycle of low-effort premises and high-effort responses. Although, as usual in HN, the premises come from different accounts, so both are valid. And it probably reveals valid addresses when the image URL is unique for each email.
  - freedomben 1y ago
    Definitely happens a lot on HN, but I think that's just the nature of a mix of different opinions. Better IMHO to just treat them as individual arguments and reply accordingly
  - DaiPlusPlus 1y ago
    > moving the goalposts I'm really not (honestly!) trying to invalidate anyone's point or win any argument - my post is more of a question-in-disguise: the GP post I was replying to concerns message-read tracking; whereas my post invokes the entirely separate matter of external actors being able to determine the validity or existence of a gmail address. I'm not moving the goalposts; you guys are talking about the NFL game's goalposts; I'm talking about the FIFA world cup game goalposts.
    - aspenmayer 1y ago
      > I'm not moving the goalposts; you guys are talking about the NFL game's goalposts; I'm talking about the FIFA world cup game goalposts. Analogously, the issue would be out of bounds then, as the issues are distinct, and so a failure mode that discloses the existence of an email account is not a failure you can lay at the feet of any particular provider of email accounts, but is partly an implementation detail of how different email providers respond to emails to nonexistent addresses. That particular failure (disclosure of the existence of an email address) and any potential solution is considered out of the scope of the problem in the thread (disclosure of the opening of an HTML email due to loading tracking pixels).
- oasisaimlessly 1y ago
  You can literally ask any SMTP MX server if an email address is valid, and it'll tell you yes/no. Emails send to invalid addresses are in general not silently discarded.
Barbing 1y ago
Thinking of Apple? This was a big announcement with Apple Mail Privacy Protection, included in iOS 15 (Sept. 2021). Sent marketers into a small panic. If Gmail did so as well, should’ve been bigger news and figure they’d remind us we could disable the load remote content option.
- ASalazarMX 1y ago
  It does, and as usual, Apple catched up a decade later. It was called Google Image Proxy for GMail (or something like that) when it was released, much to the chagrin of email marketers. One of the earliest (2013) mentions I could find: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html Found in this old article about the initial launch: https://words.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works-and-what-this-means-for-you/ https://words.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works...
  - Barbing 1y ago
    Thank you. So, important difference! Since 2013, marketers haven’t known WHERE their readers are simply from users opening an email in Gmail. But today, marketers don’t know IF their readers even open an email if users use Apple Mail. Partial quote from the second article: “The issue is that the single most useful piece of information a sender gets from you[/the proxy] loading the image is that/when you read the email. And this is not mitigated at all by this system [b/c] when you open an email the server will see a request. Mix that with the ubiquitous uniquely-named images … and you get read notifications.” (I want _neither_ to leak my IP _nor_ to have “Read Receipts” enabled when I get spam or whatever.)

DaiPlusPlus 1y ago

That still tells the sender it’s a valid email address though?

cxr 1y ago
> I've noticed that moving the goalposts is extremely prevalent on HN, which makes for pretty frustrating conversations (or just reading). And then sometimes it's a tag team[…] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117242>
- ASalazarMX 1y ago
  Politicians are masters of this tactic of deflection. The nastier, the better they are at it. Calling it out is the best one can do without getting trapped in a cycle of low-effort premises and high-effort responses. Although, as usual in HN, the premises come from different accounts, so both are valid. And it probably reveals valid addresses when the image URL is unique for each email.
- freedomben 1y ago
  Definitely happens a lot on HN, but I think that's just the nature of a mix of different opinions. Better IMHO to just treat them as individual arguments and reply accordingly
- DaiPlusPlus 1y ago
  > moving the goalposts I'm really not (honestly!) trying to invalidate anyone's point or win any argument - my post is more of a question-in-disguise: the GP post I was replying to concerns message-read tracking; whereas my post invokes the entirely separate matter of external actors being able to determine the validity or existence of a gmail address. I'm not moving the goalposts; you guys are talking about the NFL game's goalposts; I'm talking about the FIFA world cup game goalposts.
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    > I'm not moving the goalposts; you guys are talking about the NFL game's goalposts; I'm talking about the FIFA world cup game goalposts. Analogously, the issue would be out of bounds then, as the issues are distinct, and so a failure mode that discloses the existence of an email account is not a failure you can lay at the feet of any particular provider of email accounts, but is partly an implementation detail of how different email providers respond to emails to nonexistent addresses. That particular failure (disclosure of the existence of an email address) and any potential solution is considered out of the scope of the problem in the thread (disclosure of the opening of an HTML email due to loading tracking pixels).
oasisaimlessly 1y ago
You can literally ask any SMTP MX server if an email address is valid, and it'll tell you yes/no. Emails send to invalid addresses are in general not silently discarded.

Barbing 1y ago

Thinking of Apple? This was a big announcement with Apple Mail Privacy Protection, included in iOS 15 (Sept. 2021). Sent marketers into a small panic. If Gmail did so as well, should’ve been bigger news and figure they’d remind us we could disable the load remote content option.

ASalazarMX 1y ago
It does, and as usual, Apple catched up a decade later. It was called Google Image Proxy for GMail (or something like that) when it was released, much to the chagrin of email marketers. One of the earliest (2013) mentions I could find: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html Found in this old article about the initial launch: https://words.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works-and-what-this-means-for-you/ https://words.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works...
- Barbing 1y ago
  Thank you. So, important difference! Since 2013, marketers haven’t known WHERE their readers are simply from users opening an email in Gmail. But today, marketers don’t know IF their readers even open an email if users use Apple Mail. Partial quote from the second article: “The issue is that the single most useful piece of information a sender gets from you[/the proxy] loading the image is that/when you read the email. And this is not mitigated at all by this system [b/c] when you open an email the server will see a request. Mix that with the ubiquitous uniquely-named images … and you get read notifications.” (I want _neither_ to leak my IP _nor_ to have “Read Receipts” enabled when I get spam or whatever.)