Impact of Gmail hack attempts on email marketing.

As Gmail tighten up their security following the recent hack attempts on their webmail service in China I take a look at the impact this may have on email marketers.

Last week, one of my first calls was from a worried client who had sent some test emails to his Gmail account ahead of the rest of his campaign but had found none of the images would display. On testing the same creative to other mail clients we couldn't replicate the problem - was there a problem with Gmail?
This is one of those occasions where politics have indirectly had an impact on email marketing. With the release of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft changed the their warning about displaying secure and non secure content. These days, if you access a secure website (https), but that website attempts to load content such as images from an non-secure location (http), you're given a slightly annoying warning:

Internet Explorer has given a warning about mixed content types for as long as I can remember, however in Internet Explorer 8 we're encouraged to block non-secure content. This is the opposite of earlier versions where the default option was to view everything.

So how is this, politics, and email marketing related? As has been widely documented, recent attempts to hack Gmail accounts in China resulted in the company reviewing its international strategy. Google also appear to have tightened up their security and have updated user settings so that on logging on, as a default, you'll now connect via https. This setting can be changed in the Gmails settings page after logging in.

If your email campaign has linked graphics (rather than embedded), chances are that your server won't be using a secure connection. If your email recipient attempts to log in to Gmail using their secure URL (https://mail.google.com) and your email contains images linked from a non-secure location then Internet Explorer 8 will give the warning above. If the recipient simply clicks the default button (Yes), they will inadvertently block non-secure content and whilst your HTML will display just fine, your images won't.

And this could well have other ramifications - if Google are defaulting to secure connections, what other mail providers will follow? Chances are that this would have happened anyway, but now it seems inevitable. So with rapid adoption of Internet Explorer 8 amongst users not quite so technical savvy as the rest of us you may need to invest in an SSL certificate for your server. That, or start embedding images in your emails instead of linking to them, which may have other pitfalls.

Of course, the smart people amongst you may already have done away with Internet Explorer completely. But are those the people you're targeting in your campaigns?