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daddykotex

Isn't Gmail serving image from it's own proxies acting as a protection against this kind of snooping?

In my understanding, opening the image loads the image from Google servers so it never hits the tracking website...

Am I right?

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It still leaks whether or not you viewed the email and what time, even if it doesn't leak the IP you came from.

Also of note: Fastmail also uses proxies in this fashion too now.

> what time

Not necessarily. Does Google cache the image when receiving the email, or when you view it?

Google only fetches the image when you first view it. At least it did when I tested it when they first started doing it.

That still seems to be the behaviour, so it still works for open tracking just not the additional meta data. Fantastic tool you've created by the way!

I haven't tested it yet, but it seems you can setup your tracking image to return a "Cache-Control: no-cache, max-age=0" header and it will always be reloaded when the email is opened.

http://blog.movableink.com/real-time-content-and-re-open-tra...

This only prevents device and IP information from being broadcasted. The main information the email sender still gets is if the email was opened at all.

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