Awful. I worked for a marketing/search company once and they loved to exlpoit the image loading hack to track users and validate email addresses. I don't know w

Awful. I worked for a marketing/search company once and they loved to exlpoit the image loading hack to track users and validate email addresses. I don't know why Google would turn this on. There are just too many downsides for a user. Privacy, bandwidth, security and fishing are my top issues (in no specific order). Google/gmail should simply prompt a user that they have the ability to turn this on. The user can opt in or not to this. It only needs to be done once. I don't use the web interface but I will have to go and disable this in case I decide to use it in the future. Again, someone sends you an image containing malicious code, illegal content or whatever and then opening by default? Bad idea. We realized this was bad a near Internet eternity ago.