Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
> E-mail marketers will no longer be able to get any information from images—they will see a single request from Google, which will then be used to send the image out to all Gmail users. Unless you click on a link, marketers will have no idea the e-mail has been seen.<p>Absurdly wrong, marketers <i>already</i> use a unique image URL for each email recipient, and Google has no way to know that all of those point to the same image. So they won't see "a single request from Google", they'll see one request from Google per successful delivery to an inbox.<p>Now, an open question is if Google will make that request when the email is actually opened, which would allow marketers to determine if and when the email was read by the user, or if Google will make the request as soon as the email is received. The latter would enhance users' privacy at the cost of bandwidth for Google, but early tests indicate that they don't actually do that, waiting for the user to click the email to make the request.<p>I'd like to add that there's no possibility the Gmail team is stupid enough to not have considered this. They must know full well what they're doing, and marketing this as a privacy enhancement when it's <i>actually</i> detrimental to privacy is willfully dishonest.