These days the emails companies send us are more interactive than ever, where they load them up with photos like the company’s logo, product images, promotions, and so on, all to entice us to click on them. However, did you know that some emails might also contain hidden images in which it can then be used to track your activity the moment your email?
If you’d like to prevent that from happening, you can actually turn off image loading on Gmail. This will help prevent instances like what we mentioned above from happening. If you’d like to do that, then check out the steps below to see how to block images (or allow them) from loading in your Gmail emails.
By default, Gmail for the web will block images from loading. However, if you’d like to double check to ensure that it has been enabled, or maybe you actually want these images to be loaded automatically, then here’s how you can go about it.
If you’re on mobile and would like to block images, here’s how you can access the settings to do so.
Note that even if you have chosen to block images from loading by default on Gmail, you will always have the option to load them in individual emails. You will see a prompt at the top of the email asking if you want to load images. You will also be given the option to trust the sender and always load images from that particular email address, like from those that you trust like friends and family.
We should also mention that since 2014, Google has actually served images in emails through its proxy servers, which means that it already helps prevent tracking to a certain degree. However, by blocking images from loading, it will help enhance your privacy in the event that there are some tracking applications that can get around Google’s proxy servers.