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Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

Does this even work considering Gmail pre-fetches all the images nowadays?

Author here, yes it does. Meaning, email tracking still works regardless of gmail pre-fetching. But accuracy may be slightly off

I'll add this as well, several companies have built products just to allow people to do email tracking in Gmail (boomerang, signals, streak, banana tag). So yes it does work

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I think what he meant is - does TRACKING even work since google now pre-fetches images.

I'm not the author, but tracking doesn't work at all – this extension is 100% redundant.

Tracking still works. Tracking multiple opens doesn't work since Gmail will cache the image, but the first load of the image can still be tracked.

Are you sure about this? There are apps that do exactly this: http://mailtrackerapp.com

I can definitively say, as someone who spends a lot of time doing email marketing... tracking opens and CTR's for gmail users absolutely still works.

Want to pose the question:

Is it a bad thing to have your open and clicks "tracked" by an email marketer?

Yes and No.

It depends who the marketer is. If it's a spammer, then the answer is no, it's not good.

However, if it's a company you signed up for their email list, then you want tracking. You want them to send you advert's that you are actually interested in. You want them to not waste you time (and inbox space) with advert's that you will never be interested in. You also want them to send you engaging, funny, provocative emails that don't annoy you.

These things can only happen if the marketer knows what people are clicking on and what type of content is the most engaging.

I don't think gmail is prefetching images. They just proxy and cache them if and when you open the email

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