Gmail Images Displayed By Default: What’s The Impact For Our Customers?

A friend of mine who did a bunch of mail based analytics phrased it thusly, &quot;Let&#x27;s say your in a meadow in the jungle, and you have just noticed that there is a tiger looking at you, are you safe?&quot;<p>He was characterizing this move on Google&#x27;s part as &#x27;catching the gaze of the tiger&#x27; which is to say everyone knew this was going on, but nobody was doing anything about it, except now you know there is someone inside of Google thinking about this situation, gazing at it if you will.<p>They may walk away, they may not.<p>One of the more awesome things about having email re-imagined in a security conscious world would be that email would probably be unsuitable for collecting marketing analytics.<p>So far no one else seems to that done anything. Perhaps the tiger isn&#x27;t hungry.

So my point is:<p>1- Arstechnicas headline stating that &quot;email marketing is dead&quot; is completely exaggerated. Email designers are very happy now, so do email marketers in general.<p>2- This might change in the future, but there IS still a way to track multiple opens with gmail (HTTP Header for the tracking pixel =&gt; &quot;Content-Length:0&quot;<p>hope this helps!

Umm... what the hell? So Google is requesting the images as soon as I open the email? Then the proxy really doesn&#x27;t make this new default as good as the old one.

I will question a solid assumption for the sake of sparking a conversation:<p>Does a higher open rate for a customer correlate to higher revenue generated by that customer? Straight forward logic would suggest it does, but does it?<p>Here&#x27;s an example: you are a SaaS business and you blast your paying but fairly inactive clients. What if all you are doing is reminding them to cancel?<p>Yes, it&#x27;s anecdotal. But I have seen this happen more than once.

I&#x27;m confused, does anyone know the definitive answer as to whether Google grabs all images when the mail is received by the mail server? Or does it grab the images when the user opens the e-mail. The fact that the article says that open tracking still works implies the latter.<p>Anyone have a definitive answer?<p>In addition many ISPs (e.g Virginmedia in the UK) have outsource POP and IMAP Mail to Google, I wonder if the caching applies to that e-mail too, when collected by a regular e-mail client.

What a relief that e-mail marketing spammers will still be able to track multiple opens! What value!

I really hope they plug this loophole. I&#x27;d say that as soon as Google gets wind of this, they&#x27;ll patch it.<p>Their whole system is designed to prevent this form of tracking. You&#x27;ve not just saved your email tracking business, you&#x27;ve merely postponed it&#x27;s death.

When did using single pixel images to surreptitiously track user behavior become a service that reputable companies offered to other reputable companies and talked about on blog posts?<p>It seems kinda shady no?

If images are loaded by default, doesn&#x27;t this open up the old attack vector that delayed image loading was designed to mitigate, wherein a spammer would send separate images to plausible email addresses and use which ones were loaded to build a database of active email addresses. Is it just that Google is confident enough in its spam detection heuristics that it no longer needs this long-standing line of defense?