Gmail's new image caching is breaking image links in newsletter
I've got some automatic emails that are sent out upon signup completion for my site.
Until recently, they worked fine. Now Google's new system is rewriting the images and storing them in it's cache (supposedly)
However, Google's new rewriting of my image links are completely breaking them, giving a 500 error and a broken link image.
Lets say my normal image url is:
http://www.mysite.com/images/pic1.jpg
Google is rewriting this to:
https://ci5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/vI79kajdUGm6Wk-fjyicDLjZbCB1w9NfkoZ-zQFOB2OpJ1ILmSvfvHmE56r72us5mIuIXCFiO3V8rgkZOjfhghTH0R07BbcQy5g=s0-d-e1-ft#http://www.mysite.com/images/pic1.jpg
However, there is nothing at that URL.
So, either there is something wrong with the links that are being created by Google or the images are just not being uploaded to the googleusercontent server, but I have no idea how to solve the issue.
Im using PHP, the phpmailer library and a Ubuntu server on Amazon EC2, but Im not sure that is related to the issue.
Answer
I think I have figured out the GoogleImageProxy issue.
This is something related to CACHING concept. suppose, you have recently deployed your php code on your server but you forgot to upload images. you tested once with your email logic. your system generated an HTML email. When this email will hit the gmail server GoogleImageProxy will try to fetch and store the images from your site to its own proxy server. while fetching the images, GoogleImageProxy found some 404 statuses against your missing images and 403 against some protected images. GoogleImagesProxy has stored these statuses into its own proxy server.
Now tried to open your email, you noticed some 404 statuses against your images. This is something understandable. You immediately realized that you forgot to upload some images, so you uploaded them to your server. and also you have fixed some permissions against protected images.
You are all done now. Now you try to run your php-email script once again. As a result you receive another email in your Gmail or Hotmail inbox. you had fixed all the issues with your images. Now the images must be displayed in your email content. but you are still unable to see the images.
Ah, possibly you forgot to clear your browser's cache. Clear your browser's cache and load the gmail or hotmail page once again. But the result will be still the same. Try to apply dozens of fixes/patches and try to run your php-email script a thousands time. But the result will be still the same. No improvement.
THE REAL PROBLEM
What the hell is going on? Let me explain it to you. Go to your access log and try to find requests from GoogleImageProxy. You'll be surprised to see that there will be only 2 or 3 three requests from GoogleImageProxy depending on the number of different images used in your email. GoogleImageProxy never tried to fetch images Even after you have fixed the issues with your images by uploading missing images and setting permissions for protected images. Why? Clearing your browser's cache has no impact. GoogleImageProxy will never fetch the fresh images even for your newer email because the images are now cached into GoogleImageProxy along with their last status code and not cached in your own browser's.
GoogleImageProxy has set its own expiry date for the images. I think one month. so now the fresh copy of images will be fetch after expiry date. I mean after one month. You can not force GoogleImageProxy to fetch the images. But its important for you to display images in your email. What can be the solution?
THE SOLUTION
Following is the only way to force GoogleImageProxy to fetch your images
- Rename your images to something else with png, jpg or gif extensions only.
- Don't use any kind of query string in your image url like
?t=34343 - your image must include png, jpg or gif as an extension.
- your image url must be mapped onto your image directly.
- If you need to use some proxy url for your protected images then your response must include the proper header like
Content-Type: image/jpeg - File extension and content-type header must match
- Status-code must be 200 instead of 403, 500 etc
IMPORTANT NOTE
Try to repeat the whole process for every run of php-email script. because every time GoogleImageProxy will cache your images and you'll have to repeat the same process for every new try.
Hopefully this will fix the issue for most of the people.