Gmail's Image Caching Breaks Images?

by Roland Pokornyik

Recently I’ve noticed that there are strange things happening with images in Gmail. Some of the images display properly, but others not, they seem to be broken.

This morning the usual Crunchbase newsletter, which I receive daily, arrived to my inbox, but the logo, some social icons and some company logos in the bottom were broken as well. I thought it’s their fault, there has to be something with their image hosting.

Some hours later I got another message from Vertical Response, with the same problem. Some of the images displayed well, while others were totally broken. This was the point when I started investigating this issue in my inbox and got to the following newsletter from Ebay.

When I first opened the message there were more than 3 images broken, second time only one, and after the third everything was perfect.

I doubt that Crunchbase, Vertical Response and Ebay have the same image hosting or made the same mistake in their email templates. There must be something wrong with Gmail.

  • Maybe Gmail’s image caching is too fast and if Google cannot download an image from the hosting server in a given time period, just skips it?
  • Or Google’s servers are overloaded? (it would be surprising)

Have you experienced the same issue in your Gmail? What do you think, what’s the reason for it?