Gmail is opening and caching URLs within emails without user intervention (2019)

Re:Gmail is opening and caching URLs within emails without u... by kubafu on Friday August 20, 2021 @07:16AM (#28244791)

You can also check for various headers to determine (with quite good accuracy) if a link was clicked by a human or fetched programatically. Here's a list I've accumulated over the years for virtually the same feature as yours:

- `sec-fetch-dest` header is present (HUMAN)

- `accept` header is present (HUMAN)

- `from` header is bingbot(at)microsoft.com (AUTOMATED)

- `user-agent` header includes BingPreview (AUTOMATED)

HTH

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Re:Gmail is opening and caching URLs within emails without u... by raxxorrax on Friday August 20, 2021 @08:28AM (#28245257)

Also most humans do use browsers, so if you don't have any following requests for resources like scripts, images or just the favicon, you probably got visited by a bot.

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Re:Gmail is opening and caching URLs within emails without u... by inetknght on Friday August 20, 2021 @12:20PM (#28247799)

Not all humans use browsers that issue requests for additional resources.

I have my browser configured to retrieve the page only and no additional requests for CSS, images, or javascript.

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