having an email client that automatically loads images is insane. it means that any spammer / scam emailer can immediately tell if their emails are getting into your inbox vs. being filtered and they can then see where you live, and target their next spam / scam to that geographic location and/or try to find out who you are, etc.
a mail provider like fastmail could in theory be loading image links in emails they will deliver to their users and store them into their own local cache, rewriting the email your client receives so that you see the images served off of your email hosting provider's servers. that would be a straightforward way of preventing any sort of image link tracking across the board, is this a thing?
This is something I've been wondering about for quite some time, particularly given that large providers can hash the images and conserve storage space by storing only a single copy of the image per hash.
I would suspect there are privacy implications of google caching what's behind every image tag in an email, in addition to the massive traffic / CPU spike such a thing might cause to retrieve the image and hash it, particularly for a very large email campaign. (But I don't know).
I seem to recall Gmail doing this a couple years ago. I was working for a marketing company at the time and there were questions as to how we'd track metrics for Gmail addresses since Google would essentially "open" every email and load the images on their servers for their users.
Yes, iirc (though don’t quote me on it) gmail started doing this a while back. Not loading them when the email was sent, but proxying and lazy-loading.
a mail provider like fastmail could in theory be loading image links in emails they will deliver to their users and store them into their own local cache, rewriting the email your client receives so that you see the images served off of your email hosting provider's servers. that would be a straightforward way of preventing any sort of image link tracking across the board, is this a thing?