It was the initial motivator. The privacy advantages however are still real. Ultimately it all goes to our customers being able to have confidence that when they're using the service their security and privacy are being taken care of.

> I'm surprised you weren't aware of GMail rolling this feature out. It was big news at the time.

Honestly, I can't remember if I noticed when GMail rolled it out. Looking back on the press from the time, I imagine that if I thought anything it was "oh, you too" because I strongly remember Github rolling out a similar feature in 2010.

https://github.com/blog/743-sidejack-prevention-phase-3-ssl-...

And sure, its not exactly the same thing, but close enough that it might not have stood out to me.

Did others at FastMail notice? Maybe. I certainly don't have a record of a conversation about it, and the first discussion we had about implementing our own image proxy was in May, and Gmail was not mentioned until much later once we decided what we wanted to do and starting shopping around for an off-the-shelf package.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Or are these just observations?