Gmail’s Recent Image Handling Changes | Hacker News Reader

Gmail’s Recent Image Handling Changes

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24 pointscoupdegrace19 comments

This is better for user privacy. Marketers will have to find another less invasive way.

This is another one of hose "better for privacy" changes that google implements to keep all of your private data in their hands while not sharing it with others unless money is involved.

Yes, we heard the same complaint when they switched to SSL by default. How do people write things like this seriously?

Do they have gmail passwords so only they can advertise on my email?

Truthfully I rather have my privacy invaded by thousands of small companies getting only a tiny chunk of my info, than by one behemoth with access to everything I do online.

If you decide to use Gmail, Google will already know what you’re doing and where you are, for better or worse. The choice is between Google having access to everything you do in connection with your email, or Google having access plus thousands of small companies having tiny chunks.

That's why I'm trying to minimize my google footprint.. Googprint (TM) :)

"In some cases, senders may be able to know whether an individual has opened a message with unique image links"

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?p=display_imag...

This is an inherent flaw with auto-displayed mail images loaded on demand. They are easily rigged to act as read receipts.

Hard to see how that's a privacy enhancement.

Well, you have the option to turn it off. They could also be serving the images cached which wouldn't indicate anything to the sender, and they are just adding this caveat to be extra cautions. Not to mention that marketing stuff has its specific tab in gmail.

Tracking images in emails are uncacheable specifically because they need to be traceable. For a set of users, you'd send out the same email, but use a different image for each:

    www.example.com/banner.png?userid=1
    www.example.com/banner.png?userid=2
    www.example.com/banner.png?userid=3

and so on. How would you propose caching that? You can't simply ignore the GET parameters since many web services use those to distinguish between different files. And anyways you could even get around that by using URLs like

    www.example.com/userid/1/banner.png
    www.example.com/userid/2/banner.png
    www.example.com/userid/3/banner.png

While I do applaud the decision to route all images through Google servers to hide the user's location, I'm disappointed that images are enabled by default.

>While I do applaud the decision to route all images through Google servers to hide the user's location, I'm disappointed that images are enabled by default.

It is a usability feature.

I can attest that my own mother has no idea why the pictures in her emails don't show up. If this keeps her privacy (or at least what shreds of it remain) and makes it easier, then I don't have a problem with it.

Personally, spam is a thing of the past. Between using multiple email addresses that forward to a few main ones, to spam assassin and Gmail's spam filtering, I haven't seen a spam in years. Even if I did, I highly doubt it would get me to open it.

That leaves promotional emails, which, if I'm opening, I already have an interest in and might as well just see the images. It saves me a click. Rare would be the case where I'm interested in an email enough to open it, but not enough to see the images it contains (which often make reading it a more pleasant experience in the case of headers, gradients, and the like).

Get hash of image file, serve cached version of fetched version if hash matches.

The point isn't that the image be shown in the browser, it's that it is requested from the email sender's server. That's how email tracking works. If you're still making the request then this approach doesn't work. (Unless I'm missing something?)

I believe if you want my location and a confirmation I've read your email you should ask me, not shadily collect information

We've noticed this with Microsoft's e-mail services already with some confirmation e-mails that display items from the customer's order. In fact, we think they might be loading the images despite the customer not opening the e-mail, as the rendering service gets hammered from Microsoft IP addresses early in the morning every day, and we know they are from e-mails sent to hotmail.com/outlook.com/live.com/etc e-mail addresses.

I wonder how that works - pre-emptively fetch content that appears in a large number of emails sent to a large number of customers?

If the reader loads the images, Google / Microsoft will need to load the image at least that first time before they can cache it

This is MailChimp's blog entry on the changes: http://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-o...

Good.

This is a good thing.

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