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Comment by endergen | Hacker News Reader

I'm the poster, didn't mean to be provocative. The blog post didn't explain how the secure proxy works. Normally email marketing uses a tracking image that has a unique url to detect which users open an email. I'm wondering what the behavior is for that now.

Is all email open tracking broken now? Good thing for users, not so good for email marketing campaigns/tools.

Was hoping some gmail devs would comment here. The blog entry didn't have comments enabled.

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Not necessarily 100% a good thing for users. We don't know whether the images are pulled and cached by Google when the email hits their servers (which would cause 100% open rate from the perspective of the marketers) or wether it happens when the user opens it for the first time (in which case they can still track openings).

If it is the latter, users can still be tracked. If the former, legitimate uses that help users will now be blocked. Github, for example, uses a tracking dot to mark a notification as read if you read it via email, which means you don't get double notified on the Github UI and via email.

see: http://blog.movableink.com/gmails-recent-image-handling-chan...

Definitely looks like some tricks can be blocked. But no mention of how it'd affect the classic technique of having a single pixel image with a unique URL (Per user) so that you can track opens.

I'm assuming at this point that that would still work. But as mentioned in the Movable Ink article all sorts of other tracking and image request headers are lost.

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