> Convenience and features over security and privacy I don't understand. It probably has to do with the Zeitgeist. The images were originally blocked because

> Convenience and features over security and privacy I don't understand. It probably has to do with the Zeitgeist. The images were originally blocked because of security and privacy concerns. Rendering of images is potentially insecure because of bugs in the browsers. By proxying the images, Google as an webmail provider, screens you from your browser bugs. Solved. Rendering of images is a privacy concern because of tracking. By fetching the images from another place, the attacker cannot know your location, your OS, language setting, etc... Solved. Rendering the image allow checking when and if the email is ever opened, which can be useful in marketing^Wspam primarily because they can understand whether an email is active/exists or not. Not Solved. The latter however is a general problem. There are many other ways to know whether an email account exists or not. Many mail servers respond with bounce emails anyway. They won't bounce on detected spam, but that's not the point; this feature is an additional barrier for image tracking for content that has passed through the spam filter already.