[WrathOfJay]

IIRC, that was the exact argument for disabling image loading when it was first introduced.

The responsible thing for services like gmail and o365 to do would be to eat the resource costs and just open ALL external content within a privacy sandbox, thereby polluting the data. Then you can re-enable displaying of images for everyone and the experience for designers and end users gets better.

[girvo]

Gmail does exactly that, I believe? It proxies the external resources to hide your IP.

What it can’t do sadly is strip out tracking functions (unique IDs and such). Dunno how that could even be solved tbh

[account42]

Gmail proxies the images when you open the email.

What the parent is suggesting is for Gmail to download the images as soon as the server receives the email, thereby rendering any tracking data meaningless.