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 whe

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 :)