Earlier in the day we reported that Google just made “improvements” to Gmail. Google has aded the ability to immediately render photos in email messages you receive from their highly popular service.

Previously, Gmail users would receive an email with big blank white spaces that would ask you if you wanted to see the images in the message and then quickly decide if it was ok to continue receiving messages inside future emails from that particular sender.

Well yesterday GMail turned on the faucet that allows the images to directly pass through to your Gmail box, sort of. Now, instead of receiving the image directly from the sender, the image gets cached in a Google proxy server and then Google displays it for you. There’s no real slow down or anything in the way you receive the message or the image. And, people who thought it was a pain in the ass to click the button allowing images are saved of that task. For some this means, beautiful messages, quicker.

Well this isn’t a good thing for marketers and while I’m far from a conspiracy theorist, there may be a play here to charge marketers money to send images in Gmail. This could prove to be a great revenue stream for Google because millions of business users use Google Apps and Gmail for their email. Techfaster is one of those businesses, as has every new media company that I’ve founder (thedroidguy.com, nibletz.com).

I was just now thumbing through my Digg reader and I saw a story on AdAge that explained in depth how the latest advancements in Gmail were really bad for marketers.

Well that made me immediately think of Yesware I service I love to use, but sometimes hate when it’s used on me. YesWare can tell you if a user has viewed your email and more importantly where they viewed it. I tend to work a lot, I mean a whole lot, like 100-120 hours per week but when it’s not work time I really don’t care for people bombarding me, and knowing where I am at all times.

With YesWare if you open an email from someone who sent you an email with YesWare enabled, that person used to be able to see where you were when you opened it and what kind of device you opened it on.

For sales people and as a user myself this is great. Say you send a proposal to a regional sales contact in Atlanta and you know that sales person needs to send it up the chain through say, New York. Well you’ll get a report from YesWare every time that email is opened. It could be a good sign to see the email opened in New York then Atlanta, then New York again. It’s a great signal that your proposal is at least being looked at.

Now say you have a remote worker who is supposed to be working at their home in Virginia, but you send them an email with Yesware and they open it on their iPhone in Miami.

You see how valuable this tool is.  Not to mention the team that built it is solid and brilliant.

Well yesterday a post on their blog revealed that thousands of users were getting YesWare reports that their emails were being opened in Mountain View California, which we all know is home to Google.

The biggest functionality for YesWare is to know that the message was opened, and that functionality has not been compromised. However, the ability to know where the message was opened, is toast for now.

I assure you thought that YesWare is trying to figure out how to fix that, if they can. For now they, like most marketers, may be at the mercy of Google.

If you’re a YesWare user you can stay up to date with the issue here with this YesWare blog post.