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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

(1) happens in relatively few email clients. Every major client loads images by default except Thunderbird and it is not common.

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I always wondered why mail providers don't load all images automatically the moment the mail is received and present a cached image to the users. Wouldn't that make tracking useless?

...and Outlook

Nope, Outlook definitely loads images unless you or your administrator changed the setting.

This is simply not true. Out of the box Outlook install does not display images for senders not marked safe, nor does Outlook Web App.

>Outlook definitely loads images unless you or your administrator changed the setting.

I just installed a fresh copy of Office 2019 in a vm and Outlook's default setting doesn't load images. This block-downloading-images-default behavior matches what I read here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/block-or-unblock-...

Hm, I stand corrected

And except gmail's web interface, which is one of the biggest email clients these days.

Gmail's web interface does load images by default.

Technically it loads all images through a Google proxy[0] which in theory prevents third parties from using images for tracking. The third parties only get a 'hit' when Google pulls the image into their cache, which is not when you open the mail.

Google can still track you, but if you really care about that then you're probably not using Gmail anyway.

[0]: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html

Gmail won't load remote images when you open the mail. It will load images from Google servers that have been cached.

it doesn't pre-cache them, Google requests them in real-time when you view them

It does not load them from 3rd parties. It cached them and loads them from Google's servers. Open your network tab and see

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/gmail...

This protects your IP address and user agent string from being read by the sender, but otherwise doesn't change anything

Gmail made changes years ago to proxy images to prevent leaking info like this.

https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html

This helps in that you don't connect directly to the image so it doesn't leak your IP and other info that would be available from the connection.

Marketing emails still send unique URLs for each recipient so they can associate your email address with opening any images and links. Google's proxy doesn't remedy this.

Won't the image proxy make it look like all emails to Gmail addresses are always opened, essentially making the tracking useless?

As far as I know, Gmail doesn't load the images until the first time the user opens the message, so it unfortunately doesn't make the tracking as useless as you could hope.

Fairmail on Android blocks trackers.

Apple Mail on iOS doesn’t.

I don't think it does. Perhaps you changed the default. Or if you're on a managed device, perhaps your administrator did.

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