this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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IME they usually proxy and/or prefetch images for caching instead of blocking them. Only spam content is blocked by default.
This wouldn't help, would it? How would you prefetch and cache:
site.com/base64u-to-niceware-word-array/image.gif
? It would look like a normal image URL in any article, but actually represent data.
Note: "niceware" is a way to convert binary or text data into a set of words like "cow-heart-running-something-etc".
If it’s prefetched, it doesn’t matter that you reveal that it’s been “opened,” as that doesn’t reveal anything about the recipient’s behavior, other than that the email was processed by the email server.
If by prefetch you mean the server grabs the images ahead of time vs the client, this does not happen, at least on amy major modern platform that I know of. They will cache once a client has opened, but unique URLs per recipient are how they track the open rates.
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection does this. See https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/pt9ycv/apples_mail_privacy_protection/ for a post from three years ago talking about it.
I don’t know if any other major providers take this approach but Apple / iCloud is definitely one of them.