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Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Google gmail image caching, why google didn't do it right

Both the gmail users and the marketers are seeing many things going wrong with Google gmail image caching through its proxy servers. The intentions were not mentioned by google and not convincing enough, why its users needed that change.  Is it simply a better user experience by serving image faster?  or preventing images from compromising the security of the user's computer? If so google has better techniques to cache those images on its servers without fetching them from their destination location as other streaming companies do! It doesn't require a google's proxy link.

Second, the implementation is so bad that google doesn't know whether the image is static or dynamic. As the content on web is going dynamic and personalised, how can google serve some stale content which it fetched when one gmail user opened it at some time and keep serving the old stuff again and again when the user opens.

Now from the past couple of days, their image proxy servers are failing to serve even static images. Here are some mailers from retailers, that have some images missing on gmail.

It looks like google tried to get control over email marketing landscape and failed to understand the eco system and goofed up in the process.  

It is better for google to restore the broken things first before attempting to do something funny.





More articles on the subject
1. Gmail Images Broken in our Marketing Emails
2. Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
3. Thanks, Google: Cashing In On Gmail Caching
4. Gmail is back up, but strange problem persists


PS: The comments and remarks are of the blogger and not as a representative of any company.

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