Best practices aside (like NEVER host email images from a 3rd party), this would be hilarious if we weren't trending on AngelList. :P<p>My CEO, Brian, uses a picture of himself in his email. The image is hosted here:
http://i49.tinypic.com/2uol63m.png
(tinypic is a Photobucket company)<p>Looks lively, attentive, and friendly... right?<p>Gmail image cache of the image returns a cat:
https://ci6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/se_iEEzdxzy1wRbMk8xXJhM7C7jqp2RyINhqPoq8Ybbn4P6yi0FqdB9RXMq-iat9ut2pNofWz7o=s0-d-e1-ft#http://i49.tinypic.com/2uol63m.png<p>Not the same person...<p>Now Brian's emails (including emails to investors and all previous emails he's sent) contain a cat sleeping on a couch instead of a goofy smiling face.<p>Dig into the guts of the problem: When you visit the image (http://i49.tinypic.com/2uol63m.png) with a browser, you get Brian's smiling face. Download the same image with wget and you get a sleeping cat! Looks like Photobucket/tinypic is changing what they return based on headers and Gmail image cache doesn't send the same headers as my browser.<p>IT GETS WORSE!!!!<p>Another image in Brian's email signature (which used to look like his name signed in cursive), has ALSO been replaced with a selfie containing quite a bit of cleavage!<p>Lesson learned: those "unique" image file name hashes are actually recyclable!
This sounds like an attempt by Photobucket to avoid people abusing their system in an automated fashion to build scraping sites -- if you get a psuedorandom photo from their collection every time you use an agent other than a common browser, that thwarts people's intentions but doesn't raise any obvious flags until they put a human in the loop. (You can, of course, circumvent this by having your wget say "No, I'm Chrome! Honest!" or using a headless chrome instance, but simple tripwires like this cut down script kiddies by 90%+ in some circumstances.)<p>This happens to interact quirkily with your boss' decision to use PhotoBucket as a CDN for his email and Google's recent implementation of the Gmail image caching feature.
If anyone has any idea how we can fix this, I'd love to not have to explain to all the investors/customers why I am messaging them pictures of cleavage..
I can't find the link to his signed name, i think you forgot to add it :).<p>Anyway, maybe use this link <a href="http://oi49.tinypic.com/2uol63m.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://oi49.tinypic.com/2uol63m.jpg</a> . Just tried it using wget and i get his pic.<p>Edit: Just tried wget on the original link and i get his pic fine, not the cat. This is using wget form a Centos 6+ server.
Update: The images APPEAR to have flipped back to normal somehow... I'm having Brian put his images on a server we control from now on (just in case it happens again). So hopefully we don't risk offending our partners/customers/investors again. This has been an amusing 16 hours.