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Discussion on: Calm, Private and Healthy, A HEY Email Review

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

The 1x1px trackers are subverted by gmail, as far as I remember. Most email clients provide at the very least a feature where they don't load remote content until you approve the sender.

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aleccool213 profile image
Alec Brunelle

Hi Ben,

Gmail still loads pixel trackers client-side. They are loaded from a proxy but will still be loaded. They do this just to scan for malware, they do not strip them from the email content.

It is true most clients provide the feature to not load them. The issue is that it isn't by default and also most emails are not understandable without images.

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Luke Harris

This is true - Gmail does this by loading them on their servers if I remember right. Pixel trackers do nothing these days if you send to Gmail addresses.

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Alec Brunelle

Hi Luke,

As far I know, this is not true. Gmail does load images through their servers but they do this just to scan for malware, not for stripping out pixel trackers. Pixel trackers still get loaded client-side on Gmail.

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Luke Harris

Actually I just looked it up and it’s been a thing since 2013. gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/image...

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aleccool213 profile image
Alec Brunelle • Edited

I read the same post today when someone else referred to it me :)

In the post it never explicitly states that it strips out pixel trackers. It simply scans them for malware and serves than from a proxy. HEY does the same thing but actually removes the tracker from the email HTML content.

Google doesn’t say when the load the images from the proxy.

  1. They load the images when the email comes in.

In this case, the pixel trackers would be inaccurate and always gaslight marketers. They would get data saying the email was received right when the email was sent.

  1. They load the images from the proxy when the client requests the email to be viewed.

In this case, the pixel tracker would provide accurate data. The image is being loaded through the proxy in real time when the user is viewing it.