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The thing that annoys me most is that now GMail by default shows images which can allow spammers and marketers to detect open rates and validate active email ad
by aleem 12y ago
The thing that annoys me most is that now GMail by default shows images which can allow spammers and marketers to detect open rates and validate active email addresses.
This is made worse by the fact that marking messages as spam requires you to open the email first. By the time you open it, the spammer knows your email address is valid and active and even if you mark it as spam, your email will probably have made it to some other list of 'validated gmail users'.
- nkozyra 12y agoThe images are precached by Google so that this doesn't happen. The requested image doesn't come from its originating source. For example, here is Basecamp's logo as it's displayed by Gmail: https://ci5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/YBj6RKkd7c8dtR81gfn-tIDDfaoyx6dXVlgJX2r5Ez9nK8CFb8Xy6p_OFNVjTRvOx9KoNNDfok-Kkj5eU8vdqS9AKM2vCiieL1BWhijFavW731Qb-vMdstbSmJ0OM9kGqIVKDXbjl-VJBK92hBndHA=s0-d-e1-ft#https://bcx.basecamp-static.com/assets/mailer/bc_logo-f21bbd816610203623eb078e63a6c39e.png https://ci5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/YBj6RKkd7c8dtR81gfn-...
- kretor 12y agoGoogle acts as a sort of proxy for those images, so by setting certain http headers, the marketers can make the proxy access the original image every time the email is being opened. So they can track the time you open their email.
- errantmind 12y agoI'm not sure where this is coming from as I can mark messages as spam without opening them using both the android app and browser. Also, in the settings you can set it to ask before displaying images.
- sjs382 12y agoThe thing that annoys me most is that now GMail by default shows images which can allow spammers and marketers to detect open rates and validate active email addresses. These images are proxied, so the sender can't tell if you actually viewed them them. Only Google can. http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.htm... You can also disable the "auto-viewing" of images, as described in the link above. This is made worse by the fact that marking messages as spam requires you to open the email first. You can still check the little box next to the email (in the inbox view) and then click "spam". This allows you to mark an email as spam without viewing it.
- rprime 12y agoGMail is not displaying the images from remote hosts by default. They've recently started to proxy the images on their servers, thus they can check them before showing them to you. And also this did the opposite of what you're saying about. Marketers/spammers will get no opens info given only GMail will fetch the image resource.
- takeda 12y agoYou are missing that when Google is fetching given image it means the email was most likely not labeled as spam.