More info about Gmail image caching

A lot of people are discussing the new Gmail image caching around the web.
This doesn’t yet appear to be rolled out across all of Google’s network, so some people in different parts of the world are reporting different behaviors. This is leading to a little bit of confusion, as folks are reporting things like seeing multiple opens for a single image. These reports are clearly accurate, but may only be an artifact of a slow rollout across the network.
There are a couple bullet points I think are important.

  • This does not affect tracking of the first email open as the cache fetches the image from the sender.
  • This does affect tracking if someone opens an email more than once as the email client is pulling images from the Google cache.
  • This does affect geolocation detection as Google is not providing any information about where the open happened.
  • This does affect user agent detection as Google is not providing any information about the original user agent string.
  • This does affect device detection as most of that is done by detecting the user agent.

Derek Harding tested whether or not Google was respecting the expires or no-cache headers. He served images with headers including

Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: 0

but Google still cached the image.
Right now there doesn’t seem to be any way to bypass the image caching step. I am also not sure how this is affecting people reading mail on standard mail clients (mail.app) or apps on mobile devices.
Other articles discussing the Gmail image caching
Zettasphere: Google Gmail change Breaks Email Open Tracking
ExactTarget: Gmail Now Caching Images
MailChimp: How Gmail’s Image Caching Affects Open Tracking
EmailExpert: Gmail Breaks Email Marketing Again
Frenzy Commerce: Gmail image changes: everything email marketers need to know

Related Posts

Judge sides with plaintiff, refuses to dismiss wiretapping suit against Google

Judge Koh published her ruling on Google’s motion to dismiss today.
It’s a 43 page ruling, which I’m still digesting. But the short answer is that Google’s motion was denied almost in total. Google’s motion was granted for two of the claims: that email is confidential as defined by the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA, section 632) and dismissal of a claim under Pennsylvania law.

Read More

Gmail promotions tab

Chad White explains why you shouldn’t ask recipients to move mail from the promotions tab to the inbox.

Read More

Flush your DNS cache (again)

This time it appears that DNS for major websites, including the NY Times, has been compromised. Attackers put in DNS entries that redirected visitors to a malware site. The compromise has been fixed and the fake DNS entries corrected.
However, people may still have the old data in their DNS caches and security experts are suggesting everyone flush their DNS cache to make sure the fake data is gone.
The Washington Post has an article explaining DNS hijacking.

Read More