A dialog popped up when I logged into email, and before I'd seen this thread.

That dialog was much along the lines of "We'll now show you images in your email automatically." with a big "OK" button.

I don't recall whether there was a less prominent "No, thanks" as I was only logging on to reply to one question really quickly.

I suspect this is a UX anti-pattern. I've gone back into my settings and changed it back to "Don't display images".

The alternative to "OK" is "Settings," with a link that just dumps you into the main settings view… leaving you to find the Images section to change it back. Quite an opt-in.

Otoh, this makes it harder for email marketers and generally other people to see if I'm reading their mail.

+1

"Want to see if your users are opening their emails? Pay to display your message in gmail's promotions tab."

Now google has the data, and they almost defaulted the option for everyone. That gives them a big boost in data receives which they could use for marketing "(hey guys you remember you got × amount of image loads, we made your images get loaded by × more users now if you want the data we got it right here for the right price.)"

If you go to the trouble to figure out how to disable the "auto-load images" setting, then they're just as blocked as before.

If you accept the new default, it's far easier for them to track you, because Google will kindly be loading their tracking images on your behalf when you open the email, every time.

> I suspect this is a UX anti-pattern. I've gone back into my settings and changed it back

Gmail has done this enough times around already for to me become a UX anti-pattern in itself.

It's weird to look back to the days people were begging for invites and Gmail was the best game in town. These days the few times I'm forced to use GMail it almost makes me rage.

The "normal users" I know which are forced to cope with Gmail are constantly and consistenly confused, asking me where things they used to know have gone, and why Google is ruining Gmail.

Glad I migrated to something better, somewhere where I know for a fact that I am the customer, not the product.

To what did you migrate?

I moved to fastmail which I found wildly refreshing. In the same sense I found Gmail refreshing when it first was launched.

Once you try using fastmail, you will be surprised by how incredibly lightweight it is. When you first get used to that, trying to use Gmail feels like wrestling a horribly bloated pig. The UX has just become terrible.

As for fastmail or other options... I was very keen on being able to host things 100% myself, preferably using FOSS, because of privacy concerns and being in control of my own data.

After trying out various FOSS (and non-FOSS) solutions I decided none of them were good enough/polished enough for my needs.

In that regard fastmail is a compromise for me compared to what I ultimately want, but it's a compromise I'm more than happy with.

According to the announcement, if you've already selected the option to ask before displaying external content, when this feature rolls out to your account it will also default to set the new setting to ask before displaying external images.

Good info, cheers for that!

The way I read the comment, I think you are correct about it being a boon and not a bane. However, it is because the request was timed at the same time as the message read, not the other way around.

It seems the commenter functionally tested an external URL being requested by Gmail, and found that the request was coincident with when the commenter opened the email. This essentially "leaks" that you've opened the email as the image URL could be unique to your email message.

This is correct. This makes unique open counts much more reliable as it guarantees that the tracking image will be fetched. Before this change, one could never be certain how many people actually opened their email in gmail because some percentage of recipients would block images which naturally blocks loading the tracking image. Typically the tracking image is unique to each individual email sent.

But if Google always fetches the images, then there's no way for the marketers to know if the email was actually opened or not.

Apparently Google does not always fetch the images.

But even if they did, this is still more information leakage than the old default (don't load images).

Spammers who email via botnets and the like, with false return addresses, doesn't get bouncebacks to clean their lists.

But if you (or Google, on your behalf) give them a hand by reliably loading their tracking image, that flags your email as a valid one.

If you weren't actually reading the email, that's still a false positive I don't think you'd benefit by giving.

An alternative could be to let the user decide if Gmail should prefetch images from a sender or not.

Email from familiar senders would have images prefetched (thus avoiding leaks of user data).

And DDOSing concerns would be reduced because those emails would not be from a familiar source.

There is no advantage of prefetching images from familiar senders. It's not about faster image loading.

The ideal thing would be to just prefetch all the images sent to existing and non existing accounts. This way there is absolutely no way for a spammer to tell whether an email is existing or not.

> There is no advantage of prefetching images from familiar senders.

The advantages I had in mind were:

1. No leak of user IP address, cookies, etc

2. No leak of timing information (when user opened the email).

It will however leak that the email address is valid, which might be a fine compromise with a selected subset of senders.

Sorry, I wasn't precise. I was responding to the suggestion to only proxy for familiar senders. But, assuming that you can correctly identify who is familiar and who's not (there is scam detection as well), the benefit is minimal.

There is bigger benefit of doing this proxy for non-familiar emails.

Google could prevent leaking if email address is valid by simply prefetching images even when email is sent on non existent accounts.

Sounds like a great way to verify an email address to me. Send an email with a tracking image and if you get a hit, presuming they pre-fetch, you know it's a valid email.