Google's decision to change the default setting for Gmail to show images by default has been criticized by security researchers as opening the door to sophisticated forms of message tracking.
Until recently, Gmail would ask users whether they wished to display images in an email, and for a good reason: Booby-trapped images have in the past been used to route users to external malicious content, while their use by marketers and spammers to track whether a user had opened a communication were implicit.
Worse, spammers could use http image requests to verify that a random address was in use, causing even more spam to be sent to that identity.
Aware of these issues, Google announced that as part of the change it will now proxy all email images, transcoding them to avoid such obvious abuses.
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