By Marcel Becker, Director Product Management

The mail team at Oath is busy integrating Yahoo and AOL technologies to deliver an even better experience across all our consumer mail products. While privacy and security are top priorities for us, we also want to improve the experience across all of our products.

Starting this week we will be serving images in email via our own proxy servers. This will not only increase speed and security for our mail products, reduce the risk of phishing and other scams. This also means that our users don’t have to fiddle around with those “enable images” settings and see emails the way they were meant to be seen. Messages and inline images will now just show up as originally intended.

We are aware that commercial mail senders are relying on images (so-called pixels) to track delivery and open rates. Our proxy solution will continue to support most of these cases and ensure that true mail opens are recorded.

For senders serving dynamic content based on the recipient’s location (received from standard IP-based browser and app capabilities and not our products) we recommend falling back on other tools and technologies which do not rely on IP-based targeting.

All of our consumers (Yahoo and AOL) will benefit from this change. This includes our desktop as well as our mobile products across iOS and Android.

If you have any feedback, issues or want to discuss those changes with us personally, just send us a note to mail-questions@oath.com.

P.S.: Note that we are still testing and tweaking that implementation, so as always keep in mind: individual results and mileage will vary!