How To Stop Spam in Gmail From Automatically Displaying Images in Email

When you open emails that contain external images, Gmail automatically blocks them and lets you decide whether to open them. A new update to Gmail, however, disables this function and instead automatically shows the pictures. This can be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it.
Before the update, any external image that loaded in a message could be tracked by advertisers or the sender of the message. The sender may have been able to view information like whether you’re on a mobile device or desktop, at what time you opened the message and if you clicked on any links or advertisements. This can be a concern for some, which this update would essentially address.

After the update, Google now downloads the external images for you and then serves them to your email as if they (Google) were the sender of the images. This means Google has basically stepped between the conversation and filters the data through itself before reaching the sender (and thus the recipient). In other words, instead of downloading the images from the external site (and exposing yourself to the sender), Google does it for you and you just download it from Google’s servers.
So you could look at this update as something beneficial, where Google has come to save the day. But to view it from a different angle, this now gives Google more access to your data being directly involved with your messages first hand. If you take this latter perspective, you may want to disable this feature.

How to Disable This New Feature

Remember that disabling this new feature in Gmail will block images from automatically displaying when an email is opened. Again, this is how it used to be before Google implemented this new update.

To show images, you’ll have to choose to do it manually.

Start by opening Gmail and choosing “Settings” from the menu, or click here to open Gmail Settings:

Scroll down to find the section titled “External content.” Change the bubble selection to the second option: “Ask before displaying external content.”

Now Gmail will ask you to display images instead of doing it automatically.
Here are the pros and cons of this Gmail update:

Pros:

• Advertisers/Email Marketers can no longer view data about you based on their images
• Load time may be quicker because the images are from Google’s own servers
• You don’t have to manually load each message’s external content

Cons:

• Google closer access to all your messages

Final Thoughts

I’m not entirely sure if the “External content” setting change will actually stop Gmail from being involved in serving you images (like I mentioned at the beginning of this article) because it may just mean it will not load the (already filtered) Gmail images. In other words, this new update completely remove Gmail’s function of pulling external content. If this is true, the setting change will simply prevent Gmail from pulling the (already filtered) pictures from Google’s servers.
The fact that remains is that automatically loading images in Gmail may slow down your browser’s performance. Whether Google is directly involved with your messages or not, disabling the feature may help speed things up.

Images: technorms
The Original Article is Published at Technorms Here

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