Hey People,
When you open an email with images in your google’s mailbox, gmail hide these images and instead show a placeholder for those images. This is done intentionally so as to protect your privacy and is another way to stop spam, will explain later in this post. So for now gmail has changed the way it used to display images. Now gmail is going to display images without having to ask you, if the email is from one of your known contacts. This known contact is going to verify on the basis of your interaction with the person. If you have sent message to sender twice or more than twice in the past, that means he/she is known to you and displaying images may not harm you.
So next time you receive an email with your family pictures, you do not have to hit that annoying “Always Display Images from” and wait for the page to reload. In some cases, even if you click on that, it may not remember your preferences. Many people have came across this issue lately while receiving mails from twitter.
However Gmail is planning to start this change on the test basis. Their criteria may change based on the usage or other information. If the sender’s email address is not verified, then also it wont display images, no matter even if you send email to him/her everyday. This all is done by gmail and other email service providers to keep you protected.
You can also stop gmail to display images by default. All you have to do is click on Don’t display from now on under show details link.
How can a spammer verify your email address with images ?
A spammer can very easily verify your email address, when you open an email which contains images. When you open an email, the images are requested from the spammer’s server and he may be logging the request. An ideal scenario would be to keep the image name as a unique hash key which is mapped to your email address in his database. As soon as the image is requested from the server with that hash key, the email can be marked verified. So be aware of the fact next time you display images from any unsolicited mail received.
Hope that helps you.
Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla
