4 ms·

I don't understand how a proxy will protect me from an image loaded as http://marketer.com/4b3403665fea6.jpg http://marketer.com/4b3403665fea6.jpg where that

I don't understand how a proxy will protect me from an image loaded as http://marketer.com/4b3403665fea6.jpg http://marketer.com/4b3403665fea6.jpg where that hash is used to link to my email address

dragonwriter 13y ago
> I don't understand how a proxy will protect me from an image loaded as It will protect you from it being as a read receipt if (and I'm not sure if this is the case, though it should be trivial to test by sending email with images served from a site you control to an email you control without opening it) Google requests the image once it has received the email.
- thedufer 13y ago
  If you read other comments, a number of people have done the trivial test and confirmed that images aren't requested until you open the email.
  - staticfish 13y ago
    Wow this is really dreadful.
dingaling 13y ago
Now it will seem to the sender that 100% of e-mails sent to Gmail recipients have been opened, rendering actual measurement impossible. A unique ID is useless if all unique IDs are requested all the time. I'm sure they built-in rate-limiting to prevent DDOSing the sender's image server...
- Aldo_MX 13y ago
  Or possibly they could use heuristics to detect a newsletter and deliver the first fetched image to every recipient of the same newsletter.
- pbreit 13y ago
  Apparently not. First, only messages read in gmail.com and Gmail mobile clients (not any other email clients). And apparently the image is not requested from the sender until the message is opened. Finally, apparently any querystring parameters will continue to function as usual.
anonsumus 13y ago
It will if the images are cached.
- staticfish 13y ago
  No it wouldn't. You can't tell anything about what's on the other end of random_unique_number_65984654.jpg
Wilya 13y ago
Even if Gmail loads tells the marketer that you have opened the message (as people are pointing out, it's a bit unclear), there are still some advantages. It protects you from the guys at marketer tracking your user-agent, your ip address (which gives a rough geo-ip), the number of times you opened the email, etc. It's unclear to me whether the images could set cookies before (they probably did), but even without that, they could just use etag-tricks, or stuff like that, to track you cross-sites. Marketers might now know when you open the message, but proxying the image prevents them from getting more precise information. (No idea exactly how much of this and more Google does, obviously, but they put themselves in position to do it)

I don't understand how a proxy will protect me from an image loaded as http://marketer.com/4b3403665fea6.jpg http://marketer.com/4b3403665fea6.jpg where that hash is used to link to my email address

dragonwriter 13y ago

> I don't understand how a proxy will protect me from an image loaded as It will protect you from it being as a read receipt if (and I'm not sure if this is the case, though it should be trivial to test by sending email with images served from a site you control to an email you control without opening it) Google requests the image once it has received the email.

thedufer 13y ago
If you read other comments, a number of people have done the trivial test and confirmed that images aren't requested until you open the email.
- staticfish 13y ago
  Wow this is really dreadful.

dingaling 13y ago

Now it will seem to the sender that 100% of e-mails sent to Gmail recipients have been opened, rendering actual measurement impossible. A unique ID is useless if all unique IDs are requested all the time. I'm sure they built-in rate-limiting to prevent DDOSing the sender's image server...

Aldo_MX 13y ago
Or possibly they could use heuristics to detect a newsletter and deliver the first fetched image to every recipient of the same newsletter.
pbreit 13y ago
Apparently not. First, only messages read in gmail.com and Gmail mobile clients (not any other email clients). And apparently the image is not requested from the sender until the message is opened. Finally, apparently any querystring parameters will continue to function as usual.

anonsumus 13y ago

It will if the images are cached.

staticfish 13y ago
No it wouldn't. You can't tell anything about what's on the other end of random_unique_number_65984654.jpg

Wilya 13y ago

Even if Gmail loads tells the marketer that you have opened the message (as people are pointing out, it's a bit unclear), there are still some advantages. It protects you from the guys at marketer tracking your user-agent, your ip address (which gives a rough geo-ip), the number of times you opened the email, etc. It's unclear to me whether the images could set cookies before (they probably did), but even without that, they could just use etag-tricks, or stuff like that, to track you cross-sites. Marketers might now know when you open the message, but proxying the image prevents them from getting more precise information. (No idea exactly how much of this and more Google does, obviously, but they put themselves in position to do it)