Shortwave Image Fetcher
What is Shortwave Image Fetcher?
About
Shortwave Image Fetcher is a privacy-focused service that proxies images from HTML emails through Shortwave's servers to protect users' IP addresses and maintain email privacy when viewing content in their AI-powered email client. You can see how often Shortwave Image Fetcher visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics.
Expected Behavior
Fetchers visit websites on-demand. They're normally dispatched by apps to present metadata about a link (e.g. the title and thumbnail image) to a user.
Type
Detail
| Operated By | Shortwave Communications Inc. |
| Last Updated | 17 hours ago |
Insights
Top Website Robots.txts
Country of Origin
Global Traffic
The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Fetchers
Robots.txt
Should I Block Shortwave Image Fetcher?
Probably not. If you block a fetcher, it won't be able to fetch the metadata it needs to display a link preview. Fewer people will click on the link to your website without this.
How Do I Block Shortwave Image Fetcher?
You can block Shortwave Image Fetcher or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics to check whether it's actually following them.
# In your robots.txt ...
User-agent: Shortwave Image Fetcher # https://darkvisitors.com/agents/shortwave-image-fetcher
Disallow: /
⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Editing Is Not Scalable
New agents are created every day. We recommend setting up Dark Visitors Automatic Robots.txt if you want to block all agents of this type.