[yajoe]

It's also weird that they didn't explain the how behind this line:

> Instead of serving images directly from their original external host servers, Gmail will now serve all images through Google’s own secure proxy servers.

In most cases, the unique identifiers are embedded in the URLs themselves, so simply serving through a proxy is ineffective. Should I blindly trust that you, Google, did the right thing?

Edit: looks like Google isn't stripping out the query parameters AND it isn't proxying for iOS devices! This is by far the least effective set of decisions... http://blog.movableink.com/gmails-recent-image-handling-chan...

I wonder if this change is a result of backlash over the promotions tab. These type of referenced images are most commonly used in marketing campaigns and were from businesses likely to pay good money to AdWords. As a concession for fewer overall impressions, perhaps, these groups got Google to let them track easier? The whole thing smells fishy.

[mtrimpe]

They'll probably retrieve and cache every image as soon as the email is received which would effectively render open statistics meaningless for GMail addresses.

[mratzloff]

They don't, and it doesn't. See the post by @danielnr.

[mtrimpe]

They don't yet. I wouldn't be surprised if they do the same as with 'not provided' where they slowly make the data less reliable until they finally just turn it off altogether.