19 ms·

Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers

601 points by shawndumas 13y ago

kevrone 13y ago
Holy crap. If I'm reading this right, this basically destroys all pixel tracking, so no more email open stats, no nothing.
- mml 13y ago
  Yup. I'd really hate to be in the bulk email business today. Perhaps google will sell them back the data they used to create themselves.
  - warfangle 13y ago
    The future of marketing is forming cohesive communities with your customers, anyways, not spamming the shit out of them.
    - austinhutch 13y ago
      What does a "cohesive community" look like and is anyone doing this today?
      - warfangle 13y ago
        No idea, and I don't think so. Just spitballing.
      - TillE 13y ago
        Indie/small/medium-sized videogame studios with forums. Alternatively, if you're not the sort of company that naturally engenders an active community, Twitter. It's not perfect, but it's a far better experience for customers who may want to keep up with what you're doing but don't want a new email to delete every week.
- sitkack 13y ago
  :) !
- typpo 13y ago
  Not quite. According to testers in the other thread[1], Google pulls images on mail open. This means marketers will get more accurate email open stats because now the default behavior is to load images. However, they don't get cookies, IP, etc so they lose some of that capability. Not all bad for marketers and spammers. I tried to opt-out of external content in Settings > General but unfortunately it's still loading images. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6895606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6895606
  - kevrone 13y ago
    Very interesting. And seems like it doesn't affect most mobile users since they use a default client, for the most part.
- dangerlibrary 13y ago
  unique urls for each image still work. httpurl/image.jpeg?email=your.email@gmail.com
- seiji 13y ago
  You have no right to know what your users are doing after you send them a message. The privacy invading "tracking pixels" shouldn't exist in the first place.
  - petercooper 13y ago
    Why shouldn't content providers be free to monitor usage if it's legal and easy to do? Would you next start to argue SaaS providers shouldn't have any Web server logs at all since it's a way of "tracking" users?
    - seiji 13y ago
      Web server logs are okay. Any javascript-based tracking and cross-site usage aggregation is not.
    - EGreg 13y ago
      If I choose to visit a website hosted by a server operated by someone else, that server is involved and can do whatever it wants. If a piece of content is delivered to me via the mail, I should be able to open a cached version as many times as I want without any request to the remote server. And the cached version can be built for me by my mail system, which by ALWAYS fetching the resources protects me. As a question of what SHOULD happen, I thinkread receipts should be voluntary.
      - petercooper 13y ago
        If a piece of content is delivered to me via the mail, I should be able to open a cached version as many times as I want without any request to the remote server. And the cached version can be built for me by my mail system, which by ALWAYS fetching the resources protects me. Agreed, and not even the server has to do that, any good e-mail client could (as it seems Gmail is now starting to do).
    - sedev 13y ago
      For the same reason that sending me a postcard doesn't entitle you to enter my house and take an inventory of my fridge. To get that information about a user, you should need informed consent, not just a marketer's wistful greed. That same "why not?" attitude is exactly the same bullshit user-contemptuous line of thinking that the NSA and the FBI use with their "intercept it all and let God sort it out" eavesdropping schemes.
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  Email open stats have been bogus since most email clients switched to not loading external images by default.
- sedev 13y ago
  Yes, and as a consumer, I couldn't be happier. All that shit is customer-hostile privacy-invading bullshit and I'm ecstatic that Google is making a move that kills it. I vigorously object to things like tracking bugs that leak information about me without my consent, so I'm in favor of measures like Google's that get us further towards people being unable to go on data fishing expeditions such as were possible with inserting arbitrary tracking bugs in emails. HTML email is a giant attack surface not just for Outlook Express-style remote code execution, but for invasions of privacy. If a marketer can't do their job without invading my privacy, I have no sympathy for them and I hope that this technical change stabs their business model in the belly.
coffeecheque 13y ago
Longer discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6895606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6895606
- nanidin 13y ago
  Hmm - so we can flood Google's cache by sending an email full of links to procedurally generated images?
  - ricardobeat 13y ago
    You'd never win that race.
    - zv 13y ago
      Who said that you have to submit link to your server? Just force it to load large images from other servers. Well you can use help from Google search.
  - AznHisoka 13y ago
    you'd flood your email server before you'd flood Google's cache.
    - nanidin 13y ago
      But your email server would only need to send links to images that are gigabytes apiece, and that are generated procedurally, no? The true bottleneck would be the pipe between your procedurally generated image server & Google's server.
      - yuliyp 13y ago
        Whose pipe is the one clogged completely by this? Yours or Google's? Congratulations, even if Google does this stupidly you just DOSed yourself. I'd imagine there are a ton of protections in place for their proxies to not take stuff offline, such as max-length limits, per-host limits, etc.
etanazir 13y ago
When will Google scripts begin to edit the content of a lover's letter in order to protect its users from psychological harm?
Pxtl 13y ago
Seems pretty trivial for marketers to work around by making each image request a unique URL per-recipient. Assuming Google's proxy fetches the image when the user opens the email, you could use that technique to find out when a user reads the sent mail. You wouldn't get the IP address like you would with conventional bugging, but you could still find out how many users read the mail and what time they did so.
- bo1024 13y ago
  Mmm, it sounds like Google might deduplicate the images....
  - azakai 13y ago
    I thought that at first too, but to deduplicate, they still need to first issue a request for each, download, and compare. So the requests have already been made, and the marketer received their information.
    - bo1024 13y ago
      If you request every image (regardless of if the email was opened) and then dedup, then I don't think the marketers get much info.
  - repsilat 13y ago
    Dedup on image data has no bearing on the information advertisers can collect. On image URLs it will cause advertisers to append query strings to image paths. Google can't win that particular arms race, but grabbing the images on email receipt instead of on email viewing neutralises any gains from that win. One point nobody has raised yet, though, is that there could be valid use-cases for the sneaky stuff people were doing before. Images generated on the server that reflect current (updated or updating) info could be handy. It might even be worth serving different images to different clients based on user-agent strings. I'm skeptical on both counts, though.
- Ellipsis753 13y ago
  I think it caches them the moment the email is sent?
philip1209 13y ago
I wonder whether this applies only to the web UI. I've seen a couple startups that were working on dynamic email marketing - they fed in the content as an image, e.g. a "one-day promotion", but would change the image content server-side for future email opens to reflect current details. I guess that this breaks that functionality.
- elwell 13y ago
  This raises an important point.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  Such functionality should be broken - my email archive should be a permanent record of what you sent, not something the sender is able to tweak afterwards.
- MartinCron 13y ago
  Google isn't new to this whole "caching" thing. I would expect them to respect whatever cache expiration directives the web server provides.
Houshalter 13y ago
Why aren't images and other content included in the email itself? It seems silly to send a link to an image rather than the image itself.
- orthecreedence 13y ago
  Images are the "ping" marketers use to track opens. So you'd have an image link back to `http://mysite.com/tracking?email=joe@stuff.com` http://mysite.com/tracking?email=joe@stuff.com` which will alert them that Joe actually opened the email. This can give them a conversion rate: for the 5000 people we emailed, 230 of them opened the email, and 67 actually followed the link back to the site.
codeflo 13y ago
> E-mail marketers will no longer be able to get any information from images—they will see a single request from Google, which will then be used to send the image out to all Gmail users. Unless you click on a link, marketers will have no idea the e-mail has been seen. Absurdly wrong, marketers already use a unique image URL for each email recipient, and Google has no way to know that all of those point to the same image. So they won't see "a single request from Google", they'll see one request from Google per successful delivery to an inbox. Now, an open question is if Google will make that request when the email is actually opened, which would allow marketers to determine if and when the email was read by the user, or if Google will make the request as soon as the email is received. The latter would enhance users' privacy at the cost of bandwidth for Google, but early tests indicate that they don't actually do that, waiting for the user to click the email to make the request. I'd like to add that there's no possibility the Gmail team is stupid enough to not have considered this. They must know full well what they're doing, and marketing this as a privacy enhancement when it's actually detrimental to privacy is willfully dishonest.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  In fairness, it's a partial privacy improvement - it masks IP and user agent, as well as repeat opens.
  - ben0x539 13y ago
    If no actual http request between the email recipient and the sender happens, doesn't that also imply that the sender has less opportunity to do all the regular http user tracking stuff to associate the browsing session with that email address? That seems vaguely beneficial.
  - vilhelm_s 13y ago
    It doesn't even mask repeat opens: as buro9 found in the sister comment, the image does not get cached, Google's proxy will request it again each time it is viewed.
  - gabriel34 13y ago
    I believe if you want my location and a confirmation I've read your email you should ask me, not shadily collect information
killertypo 13y ago
holy smokes google is going to further grow their monopoly and try to take over the advertising market with this. They'll cache and own even more of your data and keep it out of the hands of spammers - in turn spammers will have to buy into google to get data about you. This isn't for us, this was done to make money off of us.
- eddieroger 13y ago
  Google is a corporation. Everything they do is to make money. The images they're caching aren't mine, anyway, and in many cases they're unsolicited. Sure there's the evil aspect to this (they own advertising), but there is the potential good of obfuscating your actually private data - the IP you check your mail from, when you check it, anything you send back with an HTTP request - from marketers. On solely that note, I'm all for it. But I'm also one of those who like the new Tabs setup, and rarely loaded images for emails from people I don't know.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    But in many cases they are solicited, and people want the behavior that gets triggered by knowing about opens: You always opens our offer e-mails? We'll send you more of the same of what you open, and less of what you don't, increasing the chance you'll find something you like. Stopping web-bugs from the spammers will improved things, but stopping it from legitimate opt-in marketing mails will make the experience worse and less targeted for people. The company I work for send millions of e-mails on behalf of customers. All opt-in, and I spend far more time than I'd like making sure we comply with all expectations of the mail providers and ISPs... But I'm all for Google proxying and hiding IP, cookies etc - I wrote a webmail solution back in the day, and co-founded a company to run it, and frankly I pretty much assumed Google did this already; we did that back in '99 because it was the obvious thing to do.
- plorg 13y ago
  While this will, indeed, take away some information from email marketers, it may also give them more, different information. Now, instead of getting a lot of personally identifiable information from some users (some=the percentage which still used clients that don't block image requests), they will probably get less information, but from a wider set of users - those who use the default settings in Gmail. On the one hand, their proxy solution has a positive effect for privacy, but on the other hand, the load-by-default setting has a negative effect. Either way, Google already knows which e-mails you're opening, so using an image proxy is not going to give them "even more of your data" that they didn't already have.
drzaiusapelord 13y ago
So instead of my work mailing lists having accurate stats via ye olde tracking pixel, now only google does, which they will sell to their own chosen marketers and clients paying google's rate. This isn't the privacy and common-sense win you think it is.
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  > which they will sell ... Citation? I was not aware of this.
  - torbit 13y ago
    He is only assuming. Since this is new, and the info was free to begin with, there might not be anything against this in the privacy policy? but I don't want to read the whole policy to find out.
  - mattdeboard 13y ago
    Google's an advertising company. Selling eyeballs -- or information on how to get more eyeballs -- is what they do.
    - kllrnohj 13y ago
      > Selling eyeballs -- or information on how to get more eyeballs -- is what they do. Selling eyeballs: yes. Selling information: oh good lord no, so very, very no. That information is never ever leaving Google's servers.
      - gdg92989 13y ago
        Until the NSA gets to it.
        chris_mahan 13y ago
        Or until, years and years from now, someone buys Google.
necubi 13y ago
There seems to be a lot of misinformation flying around. Here's [0] Google's support doc that clears up some of it. The most important part is at the end: "In some cases, senders may be able to know whether an individual has opened a message with unique image links. As always, Gmail scans every message for suspicious content and if Gmail considers a sender or message potentially suspicious, images won’t be displayed and you’ll be asked whether you want to see the images." So Google apparently does not see read receipts as a problem. The privacy and security protections are about preventing other information (like ip, browser headers, cookies) from leaking, rather than read notifications. If you care about maintaining your privacy, I would recommend disabling the new functionality. [0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?hl=en&ctx=mail https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?hl=en&ctx=mail
- cloudwalking 13y ago
  These two statements of yours seem at odds with each other: "The privacy and security protections are about preventing other information (like ip, browser headers, cookies) from leaking, rather than read notifications." "If you care about maintaining your privacy, I would recommend disabling the new functionality."
  - necubi 13y ago
    "Disabling the new functionality" refers to maintaing the old behavior of hiding images by default. This means that you're leaking nothing unless you explicitly decide to. This does not appear to disable the proxying, though, so you're still covered by these additional protections when you do explicitly show images.
  - ben0x539 13y ago
    The options are "Display images via this proxy mode that still leaks some privacy" and "don't display images. 100% privacy".
  - nchuhoai 13y ago
    What he meant is to disable the new functionality and revert to the default blocking of any images, which is definitely the most privacy-preserving option. The new functionality seems to by default enable read notifications as Google seems to load all images by default. Unless that's false. Then it should have no impact on privacy.
archonjobs 13y ago
I guess you could say that email marketers are getting Scroogled by Microsoft's ads. ;)
ErikAugust 13y ago
Speculation: how many steps away are we from some sort of AdWords for mass emailing?
- etanazir 13y ago
  Sounds perfect; you got to pay if a user reads your email. Kinda like Facebook charging a $1 for you to message someone who is not your friend.
- notatoad 13y ago
  Gmail already delivers paid advertisements through the promotions tab. I'm sure Google gives those advertisers plenty of metrics
  - ErikAugust 13y ago
    True. A lot of marketing emails also tend to be sorted there. I wonder if the Promotions tab gets a lot of attention from users? I archive everything in there as fast as possible.
YourSexyMama 13y ago
So there is something I'm not seeing this being discussed anywhere. What about the idea of only storing one image for any and all recipients? Yes I know that the file name is changed based on recipient to try and track the users viewing of the image. But a simple md5sum of the file will indicate that it is potentially the same file as others being cached. Google would only need to store the references and the one file. Thus, the first person to view the file (per maximum cached time-frame) would indicate a viewing of the file, but subsequent users would never be identified as having viewed the file. I recognize that there are a couple potential downfalls to this thought. 1) The time/processing it takes to determine the md5 could be problematic on such a large scale. 2) I have no idea how easy it is to change an image to be unique for each user.
- badman_ting 13y ago
  But this only addresses the storage side. A request must still be issued for each unique URL in order to de-dupe.
  - YourSexyMama 13y ago
    Damn, I didn't think about that...
petercooper 13y ago
Give it a while and we'll probably get embedded Adwords ads inside e-mails replacing existing third party ads in order to "protect" you.
javiercr 13y ago
It seems Gmail was already caching the images in emails (before today's change to display them by default). Read Mailchimp's post (December 6th): "Image caching still lowers our ability to track repeat opens, but turning those images on means we’ll be more accurate when tracking unique opens. At least, theoretically it should work that way" http://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-open-tracking http://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-o...
gfodor 13y ago
This could be anything from wildy good to wildy terrible for e-mail marketers, depending on how this ends up working. If Google makes a request for an image when the user opens the e-mail, this will be really good for e-mail marketers since now they will get accurate open stats, whereas before they only got stats for people who hit "Display Images" (surely a minority.) On the other hand, if Google (either now or in the future, crucially) alters the behavior to be smart about pre-caching images, then e-mail marketing is screwed. It will likely make sense at Google to do this, since it will improve the user experience to have the images be pre-fetched to the proxy server before they open an e-mail. In other words, e-mail marketing vis a vis gmail is now in a Schrodenger's cat-like situation. We can't know if Google is now fully, partially, never will, or will in the future pre-cache images, so for all intents and purposes e-mail marketing data is both highly accurate and completely worthless at the same time :)
cmsdog 13y ago
This is going to affect companies like yesware.
SwaroopH 13y ago
Aside from the negative effects, at least we will no longer see HTTPS warnings on the web UI due to any non-ssl images being served by the email sender.
api 13y ago
Good.
d0ugie 13y ago
Oh please Google, I know you're listening: Transcode the cached images into WebP for Chrome and compatible mobile apps. Seems like a very, very good opportunity to evangelize the format and push it another notch toward ubiquity (while saving lots of bytes and improving email experiences)...
- fleitz 13y ago
  Yes, this is a good idea, hotmail should do the same to promote whatever MS is promoting ATM.
  - snogglethorpe 13y ago
    To be fair, MS's "new image format" (JPEG XR) actually seems quite a bit better than Google's "new image format" (WebP)... JPEG XR actually adds significant features like OpenEXR- and radiance-compatible HDR encoding, whereas WebP is basically the same old 1980s functionality with better compression. So while there's something slightly sketchy about doing this, I'd say the world would benefit more from MS doing it than from Google doing it... [I use gmail and other Google stuff, and have an Android phone, and generally hate MS, but it's very hard to be enthusiastic about WebP...]
- mnutt 13y ago
  The article doesn't mention it, but the proxy IS transcoding the cached images. However, there are many instances where the resulting images are larger and/or look worse than the originals.
forgotAgain 13y ago
In some cases, senders may be able to know whether an individual has opened a message with unique image links. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?p=display_images&rd=1 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?p=display_imag...
mytummyhertz 13y ago
unless they are implementing this for fake email addresses, this is TERRIBLE! it makes it super simple to enumerate valid email addresses. patch it to fetch the images on valid+invalid email addresses, then we'll talk
- MartinCron 13y ago
  As others have pointed out, I don't think it's that difficult for you to enumerate valid gmail email addresses at the moment.
darkhorn 13y ago
Facebook is doing this from decades.
- dangrossman 13y ago
  Facebook isn't one decade old yet.
  - darkhorn 13y ago
    I know, what I mean is it is doing it for a very long time.
fleitz 13y ago
Just encode the random information in the domain :)
mattdeboard 13y ago
All tracking cookie/email marketing/whatever other fluffy stuff aside, I'd love to hear about technical hurdles & challenges from Google engineers on this. Sounds like a very damn interesting/challenging task to undertake.
ianbicking 13y ago
"Google will now be digging deeper than ever into your e-mails and literally modifying the contents." This is a silly fear, all email clients already do this, as you don't display raw unmodified HTML from emails, you have to scrub it. They are just adding one new kind of scrubbing to the list of things they already must do.
dangrossman 13y ago
Regardless of any caching or deduplication, the fact that Google is acting as a proxy means an end to e-mail remarketing. E-mail remarketing requires the request come from the visitor's own browser so that the reply can set a cookie to identify that browser for later advertising. I wouldn't be surprised to see this show up alongside Google AdWords'/DoubleClick's web remarketing product now that Google's shut out the rest of the industry.
PeterisP 13y ago
Excellent, I've always wanted e-mail clients to do it this way. You send me a mail - you've no business being able to track if/when/how I open the envelope, unless I explicitly wish to inform you.
- dsaber 13y ago
  I think it's the opposite. With Google's change, the sender can more accurately find out if you've opened the email, since a request to download the image will be made as soon as you open the email. However, what the sender doesn't get now is IP, location, and browser data.
  - PeterisP 13y ago
    Well, an appropriate solution would be to 'open, package and store' the email at the time of receipt, not reading - that may cost some resources of extra bandwidth and storage, but would provide a better functionality and permanence in case of opening that email two years later when the sending company and their servers may be out of business.
possibilistic 13y ago
AdSense. This is all about pushing dollars to AdSense. First they started filtering marketing messages into separate tabs, which I'm assuming dramatically cut readership. Now they're going to make it impossible to "bug" emails for read receipts. The only metric left is the "click". Email marketing just became a whole lot less valuable.
zaroth 13y ago
Depending on Google's caching strategy and deduping capabilities, I wonder if longer term any embedded IMG link will start to count towards your quota... In order to maintain privacy it's been well discussed they would have to cache always and forever. So large images will definitely add up over time. I also wonder, even if they have a persistent cache, you might still want to check the Last-Modified and Etag of the URI. I don't think many people embed dynamic images like this, and I'm not sure how most clients would handle it, but it's an interesting corner case. Seems like a safer first step would have been turning on the Silk-like proxy and keeping image display logic the same. Then you have only benefits due to reduced Cookie, Referral, and IP masking, and could also look for corrupt images which are actually JavaScript and that sort of thing. This wouldn't have been a shot across the bow of the golden goose of open tracking, which imputes Google's true motives. Saying that the proxy is enough to require everyone to opt-out of auto-images may be a bridge too far, especially when there are ways to register your domain so that inline-images ARE automatically displayed, which IMO is what they should be encouraging. Another way at this would be to find a UI widget which helped users actually understand the possible tracking info they would be giving up to the sender. Still further putting control in hands of the sender would be a data tag on the IMG which told Google they should cache, and in exchange would result in wider image viewership. Tracking opens, actions, and coverts is the most important metrics to providing feedback to improving copy, it's devious for a display ad company to fuck with this on shaky privacy grounds. I guess at least they do provide an opt-out, which will be used by ~0.1% of users...
mnutt 13y ago
Some other technical aspects of this: GMail serves all images from a datacenter in Mountain View, CA, so if your email's images were served from multiple datacenters or a CDN, there is a good chance they will load more slowly, depending on your caching headers. They optimize images on the fly, which may introduce more latency. Their optimizer doesn't take into account whether the optimized image is smaller than the original, so the image they serve is occasionally larger (and/or looks worse) than the original. The maximum image size seems to be about 10MB.
- raldi 13y ago
  > GMail serves all images from a datacenter in Mountain View, CA Citation needed.
  - mnutt 13y ago
    A clarification: GMail's proxy is in two pieces; your email client connects to GMail's CDN, but in order to load content from the origin it passes through a pool of servers in Mountain View. My guess is that the transcoding servers are all located there.
    - jrockway 13y ago
      Why do you think the servers are in Mountain View?
      - raldi 13y ago
        For the same reason Starbucks grows all its coffee in Seattle.
      - mnutt 13y ago
        I set up some servers in the US and Asia and had some images proxied to them through GMail's proxy. The traceroute paths and latencies from the requesting IPs lead me to believe that the servers were in the US, most likely Mountain View. I probably shouldn't have asserted Mountain View, as it's more of an educated guess. Edit: here's a traceroute from Hong Kong to the Google server that made the proxy request. Is there a flaw in this method? @hongkong:~# traceroute 66.249.88.203 traceroute to 66.249.88.203 (66.249.88.203), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets 1 119.9.72.2 (119.9.72.2) 1.168 ms 1.130 ms 1.122 ms 2 119.9.64.64 (119.9.64.64) 1.092 ms 1.058 ms 1.052 ms 3 vl902.edge3.hkg1.rackspace.net (120.136.47.19) 1.307 ms 1.205 ms 1.304 ms 4 RHI-0001.gw2.hkg3.asianetcom.net (203.192.178.65) 1.169 ms 1.148 ms 1.123 ms 5 google.gw2.hkg3.asianetcom.net (203.192.178.30) 1.782 ms 1.755 ms 1.741 ms 6 209.85.248.62 (209.85.248.62) 6.716 ms 209.85.248.60 (209.85.248.60) 17.183 ms 209.85.248.62 (209.85.248.62) 2.105 ms 7 66.249.94.31 (66.249.94.31) 81.019 ms 80.999 ms 80.966 ms 8 64.233.175.1 (64.233.175.1) 53.256 ms 53.077 ms 53.060 ms 9 209.85.245.206 (209.85.245.206) 72.528 ms 72.488 ms 72.14.239.55 (72.14.239.55) 80.903 ms 10 209.85.242.89 (209.85.242.89) 150.251 ms 148.859 ms 64.233.174.176 (64.233.174.176) 149.147 ms 11 72.14.239.80 (72.14.239.80) 215.363 ms 215.368 ms 72.14.239.82 (72.14.239.82) 201.955 ms 12 209.85.249.45 (209.85.249.45) 223.694 ms 72.14.237.119 (72.14.237.119) 211.817 ms 212.567 ms 13 64.233.174.117 (64.233.174.117) 212.505 ms 216.239.48.103 (216.239.48.103) 215.874 ms 213.109 ms 14 * * * 15 google-proxy-66-249-88-203.google.com (66.249.88.203) 211.877 ms 212.484 ms 212.371 ms
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- robryk 13y ago
  That's not the case. The only case when browsers send no referer header is when an HTTP request is made from a page loaded over HTTPS. Cross-origin has nothing to do with that.
paul_f 13y ago
In my opinion, Google doesn't care abut the tiny tracking images. It does care about 2M jpegs. So, while email marketers might be up in arms, this won't affect them at all it appears. If anything, they should be thanking Google for reducing their bandwidth.
- wingerlang 13y ago
  They'll still have to serve the image to google though.
jrockway 13y ago
It's important to keep in mind that in the past, viruses have successfully propagated through bugs in image decoders. Proxying the images provides an opportunity to remove malicious ones.
wfunction 13y ago
Great, now spammers will know my email account is legitimate.
greglindahl 13y ago
Cool. So it used to be the case that my AdBlock configuration got to filter the image loads in gmail, and now... not so much. Thanks, Google!
- jpadkins 13y ago
  or you could just go to settings and disable image loading.
treelovinhippie 13y ago
So now only Google will know everything about you...
mattbarrie 13y ago
A side effect of this is you will never be able to send images to someone as a cut/paste if they are behind http auth since google can't log in and see them.
soundlab 13y ago
So how does this affect various email template applications such as Tout or Hubspot's Signals? IIRC Tout drops a pixel in each email and uses that as a primary tracking source for opens/CTRs etc...
- dinnison 13y ago
  curious about this too. guessing they will not work...
- medell 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure this kills Tout's tracking when sending to Gmail users.
agotterer 13y ago
if you had a Gmail folder named "Ars Technica" and loaded e-mail images, the referral URL would be "https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#label/Ars+Technica"—the https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#label/Ars+Technica"—the folder is right there in the URL That just isn't true on gmail. The whole service is served over https and won't pass referral information. Not to mention your IP and whatever other information they feel like embedded in links will still passed along when you click. So theres still some tracking going on, but they miss out on open without action emails (which is of course useful information to marketers).
durrrrrrr 13y ago
From the google post about why they don't display images by default: "We did this to protect you from unknown senders who might try to use images to compromise the security of your computer or mobile device." Surely it's this same technology google themselves use more than anyone else to identify users?
ValentineC 13y ago
Does anyone know if this is just on the web client, or if it also affects emails retrieved from Gmail via POP/IMAP? I'm not too keen on the idea of Gmail modifying the body of emails sent to me.
pessimizer 13y ago
Aren't people just going to start fuzzing the images? This sounds like the beginning of another arms race.
natch 13y ago
Google could impose a spam scoring penalty. Penalize mass emails containing unique identifying image URLs for identical images. Where identical means virtually identical.
paulasmith 13y ago
I know Google doesn't like to give numbers, but I would be very curious to know how much storage/bandwidth they use to implement this.
mariuolo 13y ago
Can it be opted out by the user?
- jribeiro 13y ago
  According to reports, the inverse question is now asked on the email header.
TeMPOraL 13y ago
Good riddance, Google!
juanriaza 13y ago
If you use django: https://github.com/juanriaza/django-tempus https://github.com/juanriaza/django-tempus allows you to generate unique links
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
w_t_payne 13y ago
As a user of email, I welcome this move. If I were an email-marketer, though, I would be livid.
drill_sarge 13y ago
What is e-mail marketing? this is a serious question. As someone who has nothing to do with marketing, advertising and all that stuff for me "e-mail marketing" is just spam. or what is it? newsletters? Does it mean that you buy mail addresses from someone and send your stuff to them and see if someone opens it?
- thmcmahon 13y ago
  It's when people subscribe to your email lists and you send them marketing messages. For example, you might sign up to an email newsletter from a shop you go to, and they will send you emails with marketing messages (sales/new products etc.)
Gustomaximus 13y ago
I'm not a technical person so forgive me if this is a silly question but would X-Forwarded-For help maintain tracking with this change? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Forwarded-For http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Forwarded-For
namuol 13y ago
The EU Antitrust Ogre is surely grumbling about this...
msantos 13y ago
This is what I'm seeing when testing it and found that all my tracking images (tracking pixel) have hits as below. Remote address: 66.249.x.x [any google ip] Referer: [not set] User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7 (via ggpht.com)
- rplnt 13y ago
  Browsers do not send referer over https, I don't know where they got the idea.
c_magg 13y ago
I understand why this feature was implemented. This feature is less private than not showing images. However, the general population cares more about convenience than security or privacy. What I don't understand is why they couldn't give me a "No thanks" option. Why am I automatically opt in? A "no thanks" button would not hinder the usability for those who care more about convenience than security, and it would allow people who are concerned about privacy to continue browsing as they always have.
- wjk 13y ago
  Please explain why you seem to think that this is less private than not showing images.

601 points by shawndumas 13y ago

Holy crap. If I'm reading this right, this basically destroys all pixel tracking, so no more email open stats, no nothing.

mml 13y ago
Yup. I'd really hate to be in the bulk email business today. Perhaps google will sell them back the data they used to create themselves.
- warfangle 13y ago
  The future of marketing is forming cohesive communities with your customers, anyways, not spamming the shit out of them.
  - austinhutch 13y ago
    What does a "cohesive community" look like and is anyone doing this today?
    - warfangle 13y ago
      No idea, and I don't think so. Just spitballing.
    - TillE 13y ago
      Indie/small/medium-sized videogame studios with forums. Alternatively, if you're not the sort of company that naturally engenders an active community, Twitter. It's not perfect, but it's a far better experience for customers who may want to keep up with what you're doing but don't want a new email to delete every week.
sitkack 13y ago
:) !
typpo 13y ago
Not quite. According to testers in the other thread[1], Google pulls images on mail open. This means marketers will get more accurate email open stats because now the default behavior is to load images. However, they don't get cookies, IP, etc so they lose some of that capability. Not all bad for marketers and spammers. I tried to opt-out of external content in Settings > General but unfortunately it's still loading images. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6895606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6895606
- kevrone 13y ago
  Very interesting. And seems like it doesn't affect most mobile users since they use a default client, for the most part.
dangerlibrary 13y ago
unique urls for each image still work. httpurl/image.jpeg?email=your.email@gmail.com
seiji 13y ago
You have no right to know what your users are doing after you send them a message. The privacy invading "tracking pixels" shouldn't exist in the first place.
- petercooper 13y ago
  Why shouldn't content providers be free to monitor usage if it's legal and easy to do? Would you next start to argue SaaS providers shouldn't have any Web server logs at all since it's a way of "tracking" users?
  - seiji 13y ago
    Web server logs are okay. Any javascript-based tracking and cross-site usage aggregation is not.
  - EGreg 13y ago
    If I choose to visit a website hosted by a server operated by someone else, that server is involved and can do whatever it wants. If a piece of content is delivered to me via the mail, I should be able to open a cached version as many times as I want without any request to the remote server. And the cached version can be built for me by my mail system, which by ALWAYS fetching the resources protects me. As a question of what SHOULD happen, I thinkread receipts should be voluntary.
    - petercooper 13y ago
      If a piece of content is delivered to me via the mail, I should be able to open a cached version as many times as I want without any request to the remote server. And the cached version can be built for me by my mail system, which by ALWAYS fetching the resources protects me. Agreed, and not even the server has to do that, any good e-mail client could (as it seems Gmail is now starting to do).
  - sedev 13y ago
    For the same reason that sending me a postcard doesn't entitle you to enter my house and take an inventory of my fridge. To get that information about a user, you should need informed consent, not just a marketer's wistful greed. That same "why not?" attitude is exactly the same bullshit user-contemptuous line of thinking that the NSA and the FBI use with their "intercept it all and let God sort it out" eavesdropping schemes.
JohnTHaller 13y ago
Email open stats have been bogus since most email clients switched to not loading external images by default.
sedev 13y ago
Yes, and as a consumer, I couldn't be happier. All that shit is customer-hostile privacy-invading bullshit and I'm ecstatic that Google is making a move that kills it. I vigorously object to things like tracking bugs that leak information about me without my consent, so I'm in favor of measures like Google's that get us further towards people being unable to go on data fishing expeditions such as were possible with inserting arbitrary tracking bugs in emails. HTML email is a giant attack surface not just for Outlook Express-style remote code execution, but for invasions of privacy. If a marketer can't do their job without invading my privacy, I have no sympathy for them and I hope that this technical change stabs their business model in the belly.

coffeecheque 13y ago

Longer discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6895606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6895606

nanidin 13y ago
Hmm - so we can flood Google's cache by sending an email full of links to procedurally generated images?
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  You'd never win that race.
  - zv 13y ago
    Who said that you have to submit link to your server? Just force it to load large images from other servers. Well you can use help from Google search.
- AznHisoka 13y ago
  you'd flood your email server before you'd flood Google's cache.
  - nanidin 13y ago
    But your email server would only need to send links to images that are gigabytes apiece, and that are generated procedurally, no? The true bottleneck would be the pipe between your procedurally generated image server & Google's server.
    - yuliyp 13y ago
      Whose pipe is the one clogged completely by this? Yours or Google's? Congratulations, even if Google does this stupidly you just DOSed yourself. I'd imagine there are a ton of protections in place for their proxies to not take stuff offline, such as max-length limits, per-host limits, etc.

etanazir 13y ago

When will Google scripts begin to edit the content of a lover's letter in order to protect its users from psychological harm?

Pxtl 13y ago

Seems pretty trivial for marketers to work around by making each image request a unique URL per-recipient. Assuming Google's proxy fetches the image when the user opens the email, you could use that technique to find out when a user reads the sent mail. You wouldn't get the IP address like you would with conventional bugging, but you could still find out how many users read the mail and what time they did so.

bo1024 13y ago
Mmm, it sounds like Google might deduplicate the images....
- azakai 13y ago
  I thought that at first too, but to deduplicate, they still need to first issue a request for each, download, and compare. So the requests have already been made, and the marketer received their information.
  - bo1024 13y ago
    If you request every image (regardless of if the email was opened) and then dedup, then I don't think the marketers get much info.
- repsilat 13y ago
  Dedup on image data has no bearing on the information advertisers can collect. On image URLs it will cause advertisers to append query strings to image paths. Google can't win that particular arms race, but grabbing the images on email receipt instead of on email viewing neutralises any gains from that win. One point nobody has raised yet, though, is that there could be valid use-cases for the sneaky stuff people were doing before. Images generated on the server that reflect current (updated or updating) info could be handy. It might even be worth serving different images to different clients based on user-agent strings. I'm skeptical on both counts, though.
Ellipsis753 13y ago
I think it caches them the moment the email is sent?

philip1209 13y ago

I wonder whether this applies only to the web UI. I've seen a couple startups that were working on dynamic email marketing - they fed in the content as an image, e.g. a "one-day promotion", but would change the image content server-side for future email opens to reflect current details. I guess that this breaks that functionality.

elwell 13y ago
This raises an important point.
PeterisP 13y ago
Such functionality should be broken - my email archive should be a permanent record of what you sent, not something the sender is able to tweak afterwards.
MartinCron 13y ago
Google isn't new to this whole "caching" thing. I would expect them to respect whatever cache expiration directives the web server provides.

Houshalter 13y ago

Why aren't images and other content included in the email itself? It seems silly to send a link to an image rather than the image itself.

orthecreedence 13y ago
Images are the "ping" marketers use to track opens. So you'd have an image link back to `http://mysite.com/tracking?email=joe@stuff.com` http://mysite.com/tracking?email=joe@stuff.com` which will alert them that Joe actually opened the email. This can give them a conversion rate: for the 5000 people we emailed, 230 of them opened the email, and 67 actually followed the link back to the site.

codeflo 13y ago

> E-mail marketers will no longer be able to get any information from images—they will see a single request from Google, which will then be used to send the image out to all Gmail users. Unless you click on a link, marketers will have no idea the e-mail has been seen. Absurdly wrong, marketers already use a unique image URL for each email recipient, and Google has no way to know that all of those point to the same image. So they won't see "a single request from Google", they'll see one request from Google per successful delivery to an inbox. Now, an open question is if Google will make that request when the email is actually opened, which would allow marketers to determine if and when the email was read by the user, or if Google will make the request as soon as the email is received. The latter would enhance users' privacy at the cost of bandwidth for Google, but early tests indicate that they don't actually do that, waiting for the user to click the email to make the request. I'd like to add that there's no possibility the Gmail team is stupid enough to not have considered this. They must know full well what they're doing, and marketing this as a privacy enhancement when it's actually detrimental to privacy is willfully dishonest.

ceejayoz 13y ago
In fairness, it's a partial privacy improvement - it masks IP and user agent, as well as repeat opens.
- ben0x539 13y ago
  If no actual http request between the email recipient and the sender happens, doesn't that also imply that the sender has less opportunity to do all the regular http user tracking stuff to associate the browsing session with that email address? That seems vaguely beneficial.
- vilhelm_s 13y ago
  It doesn't even mask repeat opens: as buro9 found in the sister comment, the image does not get cached, Google's proxy will request it again each time it is viewed.
- gabriel34 13y ago
  I believe if you want my location and a confirmation I've read your email you should ask me, not shadily collect information

killertypo 13y ago

holy smokes google is going to further grow their monopoly and try to take over the advertising market with this. They'll cache and own even more of your data and keep it out of the hands of spammers - in turn spammers will have to buy into google to get data about you. This isn't for us, this was done to make money off of us.

eddieroger 13y ago
Google is a corporation. Everything they do is to make money. The images they're caching aren't mine, anyway, and in many cases they're unsolicited. Sure there's the evil aspect to this (they own advertising), but there is the potential good of obfuscating your actually private data - the IP you check your mail from, when you check it, anything you send back with an HTTP request - from marketers. On solely that note, I'm all for it. But I'm also one of those who like the new Tabs setup, and rarely loaded images for emails from people I don't know.
- vidarh 13y ago
  But in many cases they are solicited, and people want the behavior that gets triggered by knowing about opens: You always opens our offer e-mails? We'll send you more of the same of what you open, and less of what you don't, increasing the chance you'll find something you like. Stopping web-bugs from the spammers will improved things, but stopping it from legitimate opt-in marketing mails will make the experience worse and less targeted for people. The company I work for send millions of e-mails on behalf of customers. All opt-in, and I spend far more time than I'd like making sure we comply with all expectations of the mail providers and ISPs... But I'm all for Google proxying and hiding IP, cookies etc - I wrote a webmail solution back in the day, and co-founded a company to run it, and frankly I pretty much assumed Google did this already; we did that back in '99 because it was the obvious thing to do.
plorg 13y ago
While this will, indeed, take away some information from email marketers, it may also give them more, different information. Now, instead of getting a lot of personally identifiable information from some users (some=the percentage which still used clients that don't block image requests), they will probably get less information, but from a wider set of users - those who use the default settings in Gmail. On the one hand, their proxy solution has a positive effect for privacy, but on the other hand, the load-by-default setting has a negative effect. Either way, Google already knows which e-mails you're opening, so using an image proxy is not going to give them "even more of your data" that they didn't already have.

drzaiusapelord 13y ago

So instead of my work mailing lists having accurate stats via ye olde tracking pixel, now only google does, which they will sell to their own chosen marketers and clients paying google's rate. This isn't the privacy and common-sense win you think it is.

jamesaguilar 13y ago
> which they will sell ... Citation? I was not aware of this.
- torbit 13y ago
  He is only assuming. Since this is new, and the info was free to begin with, there might not be anything against this in the privacy policy? but I don't want to read the whole policy to find out.
- mattdeboard 13y ago
  Google's an advertising company. Selling eyeballs -- or information on how to get more eyeballs -- is what they do.
  - kllrnohj 13y ago
    > Selling eyeballs -- or information on how to get more eyeballs -- is what they do. Selling eyeballs: yes. Selling information: oh good lord no, so very, very no. That information is never ever leaving Google's servers.
    - gdg92989 13y ago
      Until the NSA gets to it.
      - chris_mahan 13y ago
        Or until, years and years from now, someone buys Google.

necubi 13y ago

There seems to be a lot of misinformation flying around. Here's [0] Google's support doc that clears up some of it. The most important part is at the end: "In some cases, senders may be able to know whether an individual has opened a message with unique image links. As always, Gmail scans every message for suspicious content and if Gmail considers a sender or message potentially suspicious, images won’t be displayed and you’ll be asked whether you want to see the images." So Google apparently does not see read receipts as a problem. The privacy and security protections are about preventing other information (like ip, browser headers, cookies) from leaking, rather than read notifications. If you care about maintaining your privacy, I would recommend disabling the new functionality. [0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?hl=en&ctx=mail https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?hl=en&ctx=mail

cloudwalking 13y ago
These two statements of yours seem at odds with each other: "The privacy and security protections are about preventing other information (like ip, browser headers, cookies) from leaking, rather than read notifications." "If you care about maintaining your privacy, I would recommend disabling the new functionality."
- necubi 13y ago
  "Disabling the new functionality" refers to maintaing the old behavior of hiding images by default. This means that you're leaking nothing unless you explicitly decide to. This does not appear to disable the proxying, though, so you're still covered by these additional protections when you do explicitly show images.
- ben0x539 13y ago
  The options are "Display images via this proxy mode that still leaks some privacy" and "don't display images. 100% privacy".
- nchuhoai 13y ago
  What he meant is to disable the new functionality and revert to the default blocking of any images, which is definitely the most privacy-preserving option. The new functionality seems to by default enable read notifications as Google seems to load all images by default. Unless that's false. Then it should have no impact on privacy.

archonjobs 13y ago

I guess you could say that email marketers are getting Scroogled by Microsoft's ads. ;)

ErikAugust 13y ago

Speculation: how many steps away are we from some sort of AdWords for mass emailing?

etanazir 13y ago
Sounds perfect; you got to pay if a user reads your email. Kinda like Facebook charging a $1 for you to message someone who is not your friend.
notatoad 13y ago
Gmail already delivers paid advertisements through the promotions tab. I'm sure Google gives those advertisers plenty of metrics
- ErikAugust 13y ago
  True. A lot of marketing emails also tend to be sorted there. I wonder if the Promotions tab gets a lot of attention from users? I archive everything in there as fast as possible.

YourSexyMama 13y ago

So there is something I'm not seeing this being discussed anywhere. What about the idea of only storing one image for any and all recipients? Yes I know that the file name is changed based on recipient to try and track the users viewing of the image. But a simple md5sum of the file will indicate that it is potentially the same file as others being cached. Google would only need to store the references and the one file. Thus, the first person to view the file (per maximum cached time-frame) would indicate a viewing of the file, but subsequent users would never be identified as having viewed the file. I recognize that there are a couple potential downfalls to this thought. 1) The time/processing it takes to determine the md5 could be problematic on such a large scale. 2) I have no idea how easy it is to change an image to be unique for each user.

badman_ting 13y ago
But this only addresses the storage side. A request must still be issued for each unique URL in order to de-dupe.
- YourSexyMama 13y ago
  Damn, I didn't think about that...

petercooper 13y ago

Give it a while and we'll probably get embedded Adwords ads inside e-mails replacing existing third party ads in order to "protect" you.

javiercr 13y ago

It seems Gmail was already caching the images in emails (before today's change to display them by default). Read Mailchimp's post (December 6th): "Image caching still lowers our ability to track repeat opens, but turning those images on means we’ll be more accurate when tracking unique opens. At least, theoretically it should work that way" http://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-open-tracking http://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-o...

gfodor 13y ago

This could be anything from wildy good to wildy terrible for e-mail marketers, depending on how this ends up working. If Google makes a request for an image when the user opens the e-mail, this will be really good for e-mail marketers since now they will get accurate open stats, whereas before they only got stats for people who hit "Display Images" (surely a minority.) On the other hand, if Google (either now or in the future, crucially) alters the behavior to be smart about pre-caching images, then e-mail marketing is screwed. It will likely make sense at Google to do this, since it will improve the user experience to have the images be pre-fetched to the proxy server before they open an e-mail. In other words, e-mail marketing vis a vis gmail is now in a Schrodenger's cat-like situation. We can't know if Google is now fully, partially, never will, or will in the future pre-cache images, so for all intents and purposes e-mail marketing data is both highly accurate and completely worthless at the same time :)

cmsdog 13y ago

This is going to affect companies like yesware.

SwaroopH 13y ago

Aside from the negative effects, at least we will no longer see HTTPS warnings on the web UI due to any non-ssl images being served by the email sender.

api 13y ago

Good.

d0ugie 13y ago

Oh please Google, I know you're listening: Transcode the cached images into WebP for Chrome and compatible mobile apps. Seems like a very, very good opportunity to evangelize the format and push it another notch toward ubiquity (while saving lots of bytes and improving email experiences)...

fleitz 13y ago
Yes, this is a good idea, hotmail should do the same to promote whatever MS is promoting ATM.
- snogglethorpe 13y ago
  To be fair, MS's "new image format" (JPEG XR) actually seems quite a bit better than Google's "new image format" (WebP)... JPEG XR actually adds significant features like OpenEXR- and radiance-compatible HDR encoding, whereas WebP is basically the same old 1980s functionality with better compression. So while there's something slightly sketchy about doing this, I'd say the world would benefit more from MS doing it than from Google doing it... [I use gmail and other Google stuff, and have an Android phone, and generally hate MS, but it's very hard to be enthusiastic about WebP...]
mnutt 13y ago
The article doesn't mention it, but the proxy IS transcoding the cached images. However, there are many instances where the resulting images are larger and/or look worse than the originals.

forgotAgain 13y ago

In some cases, senders may be able to know whether an individual has opened a message with unique image links. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?p=display_images&rd=1 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?p=display_imag...

mytummyhertz 13y ago

unless they are implementing this for fake email addresses, this is TERRIBLE! it makes it super simple to enumerate valid email addresses. patch it to fetch the images on valid+invalid email addresses, then we'll talk

MartinCron 13y ago
As others have pointed out, I don't think it's that difficult for you to enumerate valid gmail email addresses at the moment.

darkhorn 13y ago

Facebook is doing this from decades.

dangrossman 13y ago
Facebook isn't one decade old yet.
- darkhorn 13y ago
  I know, what I mean is it is doing it for a very long time.

fleitz 13y ago

Just encode the random information in the domain :)

mattdeboard 13y ago

All tracking cookie/email marketing/whatever other fluffy stuff aside, I'd love to hear about technical hurdles & challenges from Google engineers on this. Sounds like a very damn interesting/challenging task to undertake.

ianbicking 13y ago

"Google will now be digging deeper than ever into your e-mails and literally modifying the contents." This is a silly fear, all email clients already do this, as you don't display raw unmodified HTML from emails, you have to scrub it. They are just adding one new kind of scrubbing to the list of things they already must do.

dangrossman 13y ago

Regardless of any caching or deduplication, the fact that Google is acting as a proxy means an end to e-mail remarketing. E-mail remarketing requires the request come from the visitor's own browser so that the reply can set a cookie to identify that browser for later advertising. I wouldn't be surprised to see this show up alongside Google AdWords'/DoubleClick's web remarketing product now that Google's shut out the rest of the industry.

PeterisP 13y ago

Excellent, I've always wanted e-mail clients to do it this way. You send me a mail - you've no business being able to track if/when/how I open the envelope, unless I explicitly wish to inform you.

dsaber 13y ago
I think it's the opposite. With Google's change, the sender can more accurately find out if you've opened the email, since a request to download the image will be made as soon as you open the email. However, what the sender doesn't get now is IP, location, and browser data.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  Well, an appropriate solution would be to 'open, package and store' the email at the time of receipt, not reading - that may cost some resources of extra bandwidth and storage, but would provide a better functionality and permanence in case of opening that email two years later when the sending company and their servers may be out of business.

possibilistic 13y ago

AdSense. This is all about pushing dollars to AdSense. First they started filtering marketing messages into separate tabs, which I'm assuming dramatically cut readership. Now they're going to make it impossible to "bug" emails for read receipts. The only metric left is the "click". Email marketing just became a whole lot less valuable.

zaroth 13y ago

Depending on Google's caching strategy and deduping capabilities, I wonder if longer term any embedded IMG link will start to count towards your quota... In order to maintain privacy it's been well discussed they would have to cache always and forever. So large images will definitely add up over time. I also wonder, even if they have a persistent cache, you might still want to check the Last-Modified and Etag of the URI. I don't think many people embed dynamic images like this, and I'm not sure how most clients would handle it, but it's an interesting corner case. Seems like a safer first step would have been turning on the Silk-like proxy and keeping image display logic the same. Then you have only benefits due to reduced Cookie, Referral, and IP masking, and could also look for corrupt images which are actually JavaScript and that sort of thing. This wouldn't have been a shot across the bow of the golden goose of open tracking, which imputes Google's true motives. Saying that the proxy is enough to require everyone to opt-out of auto-images may be a bridge too far, especially when there are ways to register your domain so that inline-images ARE automatically displayed, which IMO is what they should be encouraging. Another way at this would be to find a UI widget which helped users actually understand the possible tracking info they would be giving up to the sender. Still further putting control in hands of the sender would be a data tag on the IMG which told Google they should cache, and in exchange would result in wider image viewership. Tracking opens, actions, and coverts is the most important metrics to providing feedback to improving copy, it's devious for a display ad company to fuck with this on shaky privacy grounds. I guess at least they do provide an opt-out, which will be used by ~0.1% of users...

mnutt 13y ago

Some other technical aspects of this: GMail serves all images from a datacenter in Mountain View, CA, so if your email's images were served from multiple datacenters or a CDN, there is a good chance they will load more slowly, depending on your caching headers. They optimize images on the fly, which may introduce more latency. Their optimizer doesn't take into account whether the optimized image is smaller than the original, so the image they serve is occasionally larger (and/or looks worse) than the original. The maximum image size seems to be about 10MB.

raldi 13y ago
> GMail serves all images from a datacenter in Mountain View, CA Citation needed.
- mnutt 13y ago
  A clarification: GMail's proxy is in two pieces; your email client connects to GMail's CDN, but in order to load content from the origin it passes through a pool of servers in Mountain View. My guess is that the transcoding servers are all located there.
  - jrockway 13y ago
    Why do you think the servers are in Mountain View?
    - raldi 13y ago
      For the same reason Starbucks grows all its coffee in Seattle.
    - mnutt 13y ago
      I set up some servers in the US and Asia and had some images proxied to them through GMail's proxy. The traceroute paths and latencies from the requesting IPs lead me to believe that the servers were in the US, most likely Mountain View. I probably shouldn't have asserted Mountain View, as it's more of an educated guess. Edit: here's a traceroute from Hong Kong to the Google server that made the proxy request. Is there a flaw in this method? @hongkong:~# traceroute 66.249.88.203 traceroute to 66.249.88.203 (66.249.88.203), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets 1 119.9.72.2 (119.9.72.2) 1.168 ms 1.130 ms 1.122 ms 2 119.9.64.64 (119.9.64.64) 1.092 ms 1.058 ms 1.052 ms 3 vl902.edge3.hkg1.rackspace.net (120.136.47.19) 1.307 ms 1.205 ms 1.304 ms 4 RHI-0001.gw2.hkg3.asianetcom.net (203.192.178.65) 1.169 ms 1.148 ms 1.123 ms 5 google.gw2.hkg3.asianetcom.net (203.192.178.30) 1.782 ms 1.755 ms 1.741 ms 6 209.85.248.62 (209.85.248.62) 6.716 ms 209.85.248.60 (209.85.248.60) 17.183 ms 209.85.248.62 (209.85.248.62) 2.105 ms 7 66.249.94.31 (66.249.94.31) 81.019 ms 80.999 ms 80.966 ms 8 64.233.175.1 (64.233.175.1) 53.256 ms 53.077 ms 53.060 ms 9 209.85.245.206 (209.85.245.206) 72.528 ms 72.488 ms 72.14.239.55 (72.14.239.55) 80.903 ms 10 209.85.242.89 (209.85.242.89) 150.251 ms 148.859 ms 64.233.174.176 (64.233.174.176) 149.147 ms 11 72.14.239.80 (72.14.239.80) 215.363 ms 215.368 ms 72.14.239.82 (72.14.239.82) 201.955 ms 12 209.85.249.45 (209.85.249.45) 223.694 ms 72.14.237.119 (72.14.237.119) 211.817 ms 212.567 ms 13 64.233.174.117 (64.233.174.117) 212.505 ms 216.239.48.103 (216.239.48.103) 215.874 ms 213.109 ms 14 * * * 15 google-proxy-66-249-88-203.google.com (66.249.88.203) 211.877 ms 212.484 ms 212.371 ms

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

robryk 13y ago
That's not the case. The only case when browsers send no referer header is when an HTTP request is made from a page loaded over HTTPS. Cross-origin has nothing to do with that.

paul_f 13y ago

In my opinion, Google doesn't care abut the tiny tracking images. It does care about 2M jpegs. So, while email marketers might be up in arms, this won't affect them at all it appears. If anything, they should be thanking Google for reducing their bandwidth.

wingerlang 13y ago
They'll still have to serve the image to google though.

jrockway 13y ago

It's important to keep in mind that in the past, viruses have successfully propagated through bugs in image decoders. Proxying the images provides an opportunity to remove malicious ones.

wfunction 13y ago

Great, now spammers will know my email account is legitimate.

greglindahl 13y ago

Cool. So it used to be the case that my AdBlock configuration got to filter the image loads in gmail, and now... not so much. Thanks, Google!

jpadkins 13y ago
or you could just go to settings and disable image loading.

treelovinhippie 13y ago

So now only Google will know everything about you...

mattbarrie 13y ago

A side effect of this is you will never be able to send images to someone as a cut/paste if they are behind http auth since google can't log in and see them.

soundlab 13y ago

So how does this affect various email template applications such as Tout or Hubspot's Signals? IIRC Tout drops a pixel in each email and uses that as a primary tracking source for opens/CTRs etc...

dinnison 13y ago
curious about this too. guessing they will not work...
medell 13y ago
I'm pretty sure this kills Tout's tracking when sending to Gmail users.

agotterer 13y ago

if you had a Gmail folder named "Ars Technica" and loaded e-mail images, the referral URL would be "https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#label/Ars+Technica"—the https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#label/Ars+Technica"—the folder is right there in the URL That just isn't true on gmail. The whole service is served over https and won't pass referral information. Not to mention your IP and whatever other information they feel like embedded in links will still passed along when you click. So theres still some tracking going on, but they miss out on open without action emails (which is of course useful information to marketers).

durrrrrrr 13y ago

From the google post about why they don't display images by default: "We did this to protect you from unknown senders who might try to use images to compromise the security of your computer or mobile device." Surely it's this same technology google themselves use more than anyone else to identify users?

ValentineC 13y ago

Does anyone know if this is just on the web client, or if it also affects emails retrieved from Gmail via POP/IMAP? I'm not too keen on the idea of Gmail modifying the body of emails sent to me.

pessimizer 13y ago

Aren't people just going to start fuzzing the images? This sounds like the beginning of another arms race.

natch 13y ago

Google could impose a spam scoring penalty. Penalize mass emails containing unique identifying image URLs for identical images. Where identical means virtually identical.

paulasmith 13y ago

I know Google doesn't like to give numbers, but I would be very curious to know how much storage/bandwidth they use to implement this.

mariuolo 13y ago

Can it be opted out by the user?

jribeiro 13y ago
According to reports, the inverse question is now asked on the email header.

TeMPOraL 13y ago

Good riddance, Google!

juanriaza 13y ago

If you use django: https://github.com/juanriaza/django-tempus https://github.com/juanriaza/django-tempus allows you to generate unique links

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

w_t_payne 13y ago

As a user of email, I welcome this move. If I were an email-marketer, though, I would be livid.

drill_sarge 13y ago

What is e-mail marketing? this is a serious question. As someone who has nothing to do with marketing, advertising and all that stuff for me "e-mail marketing" is just spam. or what is it? newsletters? Does it mean that you buy mail addresses from someone and send your stuff to them and see if someone opens it?

thmcmahon 13y ago
It's when people subscribe to your email lists and you send them marketing messages. For example, you might sign up to an email newsletter from a shop you go to, and they will send you emails with marketing messages (sales/new products etc.)

Gustomaximus 13y ago

I'm not a technical person so forgive me if this is a silly question but would X-Forwarded-For help maintain tracking with this change? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Forwarded-For http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Forwarded-For

namuol 13y ago

The EU Antitrust Ogre is surely grumbling about this...

msantos 13y ago

This is what I'm seeing when testing it and found that all my tracking images (tracking pixel) have hits as below. Remote address: 66.249.x.x [any google ip] Referer: [not set] User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7 (via ggpht.com)

rplnt 13y ago
Browsers do not send referer over https, I don't know where they got the idea.

c_magg 13y ago

I understand why this feature was implemented. This feature is less private than not showing images. However, the general population cares more about convenience than security or privacy. What I don't understand is why they couldn't give me a "No thanks" option. Why am I automatically opt in? A "no thanks" button would not hinder the usability for those who care more about convenience than security, and it would allow people who are concerned about privacy to continue browsing as they always have.

wjk 13y ago
Please explain why you seem to think that this is less private than not showing images.