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Comment by betterunix | Hacker News Reader

I trained my local spam filter to do this years ago. Yes, I want confirmations about train and plane tickets; no, I do not want some clothing store's email about the latest sale on bathing suits. I only had to mark a dozen or so unwanted messages as spam, and a handful as not spam, and things just started working.

I am also a bit concerned about this sort of statement:

"MailChimp last month found the percentage of emails that were opened by its 3 million customers fell by about 1 percentage point"

Why does GMail actually allow that sort of tracking to happen? This is exactly why we do not follow external references in HTML mail (or just not allow HTML mail, though some places fail to even bother providing plaintext messages).

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Why does GMail allow users to see images in email? I assume it's because their users want to see images in email.

I believe loading images is turned off by default and users have to enable it on a case-by-case basis, though.

The default is no images, and users are given a choice to display images for one email only, or for all emails from a sender.

from what i understand, gmail allows senders to opt-in to a "good known sender program" which then automatically shows images in a users inbox

AFAIK, there is no GMail list of known-good senders.

When they refer to a "Trusted Sender" they mean someone you have personally emailed two or more times: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?hl=en&ctx=mail...

Actually a pretty clever compromise, IMHO.

From the gmail bulk senders guidelines, "We also recommend publishing an SPF record and signing with DKIM. We do not authenticate DKIM using less than a 1024-bit key. By authenticating, inline images you send will be shown automatically. Recipients will not need to click the "Display images below" link."

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?topic=12838

ok, so no opt-in... =)

Huh, interesting. I'm not sure that page is accurate. In my personal account I've never noticed that behavior -- even on messages I send which have a valid SPF + DKIM and a 1024 bit key.

GMail does a pretty good job at blocking trackers. However, this is not enough to prevent users from triggering the tracking themselves.

As gyardley says, there's the option to enable images. I rarely enable them, but sometimes I decide that I gain more from seeing them than from avoiding the tracking.

Another mechanism is links: clicking on one will get you tracked too. Normally, if there's something that catches my eye I look it up on Google instead of clicking on the link. But sometimes I either don't care or don't see a benefit to do it.

Now, the above is my behaviour, which is that of a paranoid, tech-savvy, power user who, for example, wasn't surprised in the slightest when the whole Edward Snowden story came about. Think of how a normal user will behave instead.

Indeed. Images can be attached to the emails, and the show remote images button (or whatever it's called) simply loads all images. There should be options to display attached images, remote images from sender's domain, etc.

If you allow to display images from senders domain it can still be tracked. Just a minor shift in the industry will overcome this.

Yes, but from my experience a vast majority of.. email marketers won't figure out how to do it. I would really like the option to only display attached images.

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