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leafac / kill-the-newsletter

Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds
https://kill-the-newsletter.com
MIT License
2.31k stars 113 forks source link

Feature Request: Prefetch images #69

Closed mrnoname1000 closed 3 weeks ago

mrnoname1000 commented 1 year ago

Oftentimes marketing emails contain images with extra tracking bits in their URLs. Some email clients give the option to hide images unless prompted by the user but no RSS reader I'm aware of offers a similar feature. This leads to easy tracking of the readers and the times they decide to read.

Kill the Newsletter could mitigate this by replacing the src tags with ones that point to its own server and either prefetching them or acting as a proxy. Not sure how viable prefetching would be, as images need to be stored somewhere and usually have different URLs for different subscribers (though the content may be the same). Are old emails culled after a certain point?

leafac commented 1 year ago

Good point.

I suppose that proxying wouldn’t help much. As you pointed out, trackers will generate different URLs for each recipient of the newsletter, so the only thing that a proxy would conceal is the IP address of the user.

Perhaps we could download images and serve them ourselves. That’s what I think most email clients do.

But I’m reticent to do it because:

  1. It would be interfering with the contents of the newsletter, which we try to avoid.

  2. It would increase the storage/transfer costs for me.

Are old emails culled after a certain point?

Yes, we remove old emails to keep the RSS feed size below a certain threshold, because some RSS feed readers don’t like big files.

leafac commented 3 weeks ago

I decided to close this issue for now. I think that Kill the Newsletter! shouldn’t modify the contents sent by the publisher, and perhaps the feed reader would be a better place to implement the feature you’re asking for.