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It does not load them from 3rd parties. It cached them and loads them from Google's servers. Open your network tab and see

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/gmail...

This protects your IP address and user agent string from being read by the sender, but otherwise doesn't change anything

Technically it loads all images through a Google proxy[0] which in theory prevents third parties from using images for tracking. The third parties only get a 'hit' when Google pulls the image into their cache, which is not when you open the mail.

Google can still track you, but if you really care about that then you're probably not using Gmail anyway.

[0]: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html

Gmail won't load remote images when you open the mail. It will load images from Google servers that have been cached.

it doesn't pre-cache them, Google requests them in real-time when you view them