Gmail Changes - Default to Show External Content
 

Google recently announced it was switching Gmail to automatically display external images instead of making the user click a button to do so. This means that email marketers will be able to see when you open an email - they frequently put tracking images in emails. Google is also moving to having its servers get these images for you, so that Google can scan them for known malware and hide your IP from the email marketers.

Be sure to go back into your Gmail settings today and set the External Content setting to Ask before displaying external content if this is important to you.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013...ght-and-today/

Tried to do this but cannot find any External Content setting!

Well that's a start, but isn't it missing the mark? Don't the embedded images contained references to the destination email address? That is, a unique serial number in the URL is linked to the email address the marketer/spammer is trying to reach. And displaying the image validates that the destination email address is still working, right? If I was a spammer, I'd ensure that an image could not be retrieved merely by shortening the URL.

In any case, great info and thanks for sharing!

1. Login to Gmail
2. Click on the little "wheel" on the top right corner.
3. Select "Settings" (about halfway down the list)
4. Three lines down, look for "external content"
5. Click the radio button for "Ask before displaying external content"

But in Google's defense, the default setting is to display images sent by trusted senders although I'm not sure who is "trusted".

In the help, it seems to indicate that anyone is trusted if Google's spam filters don't flag them as spammers/malware distributors.

And yes, images frequently contain user-specific urls. This doesn't change the tracking; it just hides your IP. People sending these won't see your IP when they look who downloaded it. They'll see that (for example) gfunkdave downloaded the image from a Google server.

I'm in "Settings" but I don't see "external content". I even did a search for those words and didn't come up with anything. Is it the "Settings" under the "General" tab?

Three lines down after selecting "Settings" is "Maximum Page Size". Below that is "Images" in which we have the choice to "Ask before displaying images". Is that what you mean?

Thanks for this. Mine was four sections down, under "Images" and referred instead to "external images" but I presume that's what you meant. The whole thing is as clear as mud, especially as it gives no hint as to what the control actually means.

Perhaps a screen shot will help people.

http://i.imgur.com/9oNpnpM.png

No. What Google is actually doing is cacheing those images on it's servers when the mail comes in. When you view the message you actually see what's on their server.

This only lets the sender know the message was received by Google, not that it was actually looked at.

Many such images have custom URL components unique for each user - if that particular URL is fetched then the marketer knows that that user's copy of the image has been requested.

The screen shot was very helpful. I must have a different version from yours but the same as lhrsfo. Where you highlighted "External content", mine says "Images". To the right, we have a choice of:

Always display external images
Ask before displaying external images

I chose the bottom one as it seemed close enough to your recommendation.

Interesting, apparently they have different versions for different people. Same setting, though.

Thanks for the heads up. One would think Google could manage to send out an email to its users about this change; it's pretty significant.

No, they are caching it the first time you access the email.

It's still causing pain for marketing/tracking images, because although they can tell you opened the email, they are not seeing many of the details that are normally visible (user agent/device time, IP address, etc).

There's a number of sites tracking the impact of these changes on email - such as http://blog.wordtothewise.com/2013/1...gmail-caching/

My default gmail account has "images", the other 2 I checked show "trusted senders".

weird.