> As far as privacy goes, the potential level of privacy has increased (the proxy now allows you to load images if you desire without leaking IP etc.). The average level of privacy from the change is a mixed bag - more basic tracking (open tracking) will occur due to the change of default, but with the trade off that more advanced tracking (e.g. tracking IPs, setting cookies for correlation with non-email site visits a.k.a. remarketing) will no longer be possible.
> There is no net change to how hard it is to verify whether an address is a valid GMail address - that's already possible by simply talking to a Google mail server.
Thank you.
I read through an unhealthy number of comments on the various threads about this (my train was delayed, and I'd finished the book I brought). Very few people actually seemed to get the key takeaways (your last two paragraphs) correct.
I think the problem is that Ars Technica was the first big site to cover it and they did a pretty poor job. The headline was "Gmail blows up e-mail marketing...", which is pure hyperbole and confused a lot of people (myself included) about what was going on.
Here's a nice technical blog post from someone who actually knows what they're talking about: emailexpert.org/gmail-breaks-email-marketing-again/
> There is no net change to how hard it is to verify whether an address is a valid GMail address - that's already possible by simply talking to a Google mail server.
Thank you.
I read through an unhealthy number of comments on the various threads about this (my train was delayed, and I'd finished the book I brought). Very few people actually seemed to get the key takeaways (your last two paragraphs) correct.