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I don't think that's really the case, is it? At least, not in any formally-specified way. Modern email clients will extract metadata for things like airline reservations, shipping trackers, ICS calendar invites, etc, and give you live tiles specific to that time-sensitive info, but it's very clearly supplementary and at least in GMail none of it is pretending to be part of the message itself.


Images are the clear thing that is typically remote - sometimes to the point of an email that’s entirely just an image, or rather a link to an image.


Doesn't GMail pre-fetch those images and then cache them for the duration of the email being in your inbox, so as to defeat tracker dots, read receipts, etc?


You can, at the very least, register an open by generating unique URIs for any remote content.

I’m not sure how long Google caches it. I know Fastmail is doing the same thing now for any remote content fetched from within their web interface.


Narvar's tracking emails are mostly-image

And on the one hand, it's cool as hell to see your email update itself to show tracking progress

On the other hand, just send me a new email. It's fine, I promise.


And if I’m ordering something of consequence, you’re damn right I want the time stamped paper trail of its movement you avowed.




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