December is proving to be a month full of changes, especially at Google.
A couple of weeks old is the news regarding the display of images on Gmail email, with the introduction ofImage Caching.
Normally, when we receive e-mail consisting of text and images, the latter are not attached to the message but are externally uploaded from the site to which the e-mail pertains.
In this way, whoever opens the image will leave a trace in the webserver logs from which the images displayed in the e-mail are taken.
It is not a coincidence that many email and webmail clients require confirmation of external image uploads for privacy and security reasons.
Nothing unusual about this, except that this feature has long been exploited by email marketers to monitor the results of newsletter delivery.
Advantages and disadvantages of the old system?
While, therefore, the visitor encounters difficulties in opening the images, the sender can collect data about:
- When the email was displayed;
- How many times it has been displayed;
- details about the device of the person who viewed the email;
- ip, provider, geographic area (approximate).
The benefit, however, is that the heaviness of the files is limited, favoring rapid sending without clogging traffic on mailservers. At the same time, this “little game” allows those who sent the email to analyze all the reception data and make an overall statistic of views, at the expense of privacy and security of the pc or mobile device, which is also more exposed to possible viruses.
Image caching: what changes?
With Image Caching, Google has come up with a brilliant idea: serve images from its own servers (taking over the task of filtering out malicious content, on a global scale) and enable images to be displayed in emails by default. Instead of serving images directly from the external host server, then from strangers, Gmail will now provide all images through Google’s own secure proxy servers, protecting users.
What does it mean?
“Gmail can now display images by default without any security risk, as Google will now cache all emailed images on its own servers. This, in theory, roots out images riddled with malware and prevents unsolicited marketers from tracking images to their recipients “. Until recently, then, Gmail users had to manually click something that was internal to the message to see images. The process, which involved two or three too many clicks, now involves caching all e-mailed images on Google’s servers so that the images can be checked for viruses or malware. This means that:
- those who receive the email will be able to see the image immediately;
- the sender of the e-mail will not be able to monitor the traffic received for their own viewing statistics, other than that purely inherent to their own site.
Benefits?
Of positive elementsthere are many, at least for the recipient:
- images will be displayed significantly clearer with optimal resolution, the pixel calculation will be done according to the source;
- even if the process makes opening e-mail a bit more of a chore, the pc/smartphone will be more protected from possible spam-viruses that could compromise pc and mobile security;
- privacy improvement: although questionable, recipient addresses will have a little more privacy since the images will be served by Google, via SSL;
- greater functionality within e-mail;
- safer and fastermessages.
Negative elements?
For email recipients there are no particular disadvantages to report, perhaps higher bandwidth consumption due to automatic display of images (but Google will be able to optimize that as well). Those working with email marketing are faced with a questionable change: on the one hand, the guarantee that the newsletter will be displayed with all images, as it was intended in the design phase. On the other hand, however, the view tracking system-which, to be fair, has never been particularly reliable-will not be able to track the number of message opens and details about who opens the message such as ip, mail client/browser, geographic area, and similar data to that collected for site visitors.
In conclusion, Google must be given credit for helping to change the way we use email, leading the way and raising the bar for competitors.
How long will it take the other biggies to implement Image Chaching? Bets are being taken.