cloudfront with s3 origin won't download in chrome

Question

I've set up a cloudfront distribution that points to a private s3 bucket to serve up files. Accessing the files through our distribution, ie: https://somedistrubution.cloudfront.net/somefilename works fine.

This link will eventually go in an email that we wrap in a tracking domain so we can see who has clicked it, opened it, etc. So our provider would make the url something like https://click.ourdomain.com/someobfuscatedpath. Pasting this into the address bar in chrome also works fine.

However, when sent in our html email template, clicking the link opens up in a new tab in chrome, then closes immediately without downloading. This works fine in firefox.

I've tried setting up a custom cname for cloudfront on the same domain as our tracking domain, which didn't solve the issue.

Any ideas?

Answer

However, when sent in our html email template, clicking the link opens up in a new tab in chrome, then closes immediately without downloading -

Is this on Mac? Have you tried minimizing the browser window and checking if the file download box goes to the background. I noticed this on Chrome a couple of days ago in a different context, so just asking. In my case I noticed similar behavior to yours but then did see the file download box getting hidden in the background. Probably some recent change in behavior in Chrome that's irritating.

cloudfront with s3 origin won't download in chrome

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