FlexGmail Images Embedding/Viewing

Yet more behind the scenes Flex user inquires via HelpDesk.

When I forward an e-mail that has pictures in them, the recipient just gets the text and not the pictures in the message - can you tell me why that's happending or what I need to do to get the pictures to be included with the message.

An Aside: Embedding pictures/images in your flexgmail email account aka see how a thousand pictures can not match one well constructed paragraph/thought. I can hear you clucking right now. Guess no one has yet shown you pictures of their "cute as a button" new born baby? I'd rather have just used my IMAGINATION after viewing them!

There are two parts: One is ENCLOSING images (via embedding or file attachment) and the other is VIEWING images. Let's take the first.

How to ENCLOSE Images in Your Email

Via File Attachment
This method works for most every online email service including flexgmail. Just attach your images via FILE ATTACHMENTS. In flexgmail when you hit the reply button (or compose button), look carefully. You should see something called "Attach a File" with a pretty paperclip icon to the left of it. Click there and hopefully you got the smarts to figure out where your pictures are on your computer blah blah blah.

Via Image Embedding
However, say you wanted your recipient to view the images "live" right in your email? Well you are in luck! Recently flexgmail (well, gmail domain email services) released a "beta" widget that now allows you to enclose images right in your email's body text area. So finally gmail is like yahoooo and whatevers.

First off though, you need to check to see if you are using the "Newer Version" of flexgmail. How to tell if so? Well, look in the top right hand corner of your flexgmail webpage. If part of that says "Older Version" than this means YOU ARE USING THE NEW VERSION (counter-intuitive i know.) Vice versa if your top right hand corner has the words "Newer Version" then CLICK that to go to the new version of flexgmail.

Okay you are using the "Newer Version". Now to enable this schabang. Because this is still "beta" to EMBED images you need to install a LAB widget. Click on "Settings" in the top right hand corner.

In the new web page that opens up, look carefully for "Labs" link and click on that. Look for the widget by Kent T. called "Inserting Images". Click the "enable" radio button. Then go to the very bottom of the page and click on "Save Changes".

Note: Please for Internet sanity sake, don't go hog wild and start clicking on 1001 different widgets and then use each one in all your emails you send out. THERE IS NOTHING SO IRRITATING AS GETTING EMAILS WITH GAZILLION IMAGES, MAPS, VIDEO, ETC IN THEM. STOP IT!!!!!!

How to VIEW Images in Your Email

Okay, so you are happily spamming I mean "communicating" with whomever with all these images you've taken/stole/snarfed. Happy as a clam now huh?

BUTTTTTT. Hmmm. "I can't SEE any images in my emails that i get????"

Well flexgmail wants to serve and "protect" your innocent lamb eyes and by default will never show images in any email that you get via the flexgmail web interface. NEVER.

But each time you view emails for the first time that do contain images look carefully. There will be two links. One says something like "Display images below" and the other says "Always display images from obama@whitehouse.gov". If you click the second option, well... guess we'll all have to suffer eight years of this.

Spammers use images sometimes instead of text. That really is the reason for the default behavior of not allowing images to just be displayed without your permission.

Okay, time to actually answer this helpdesk ticket:
Check to see if your recipient is actually being denied access to images or if they just didn't "enable" it on their end...

User QUOTAS

today i've eliminated all future quota charges (formerly $1/Meg/month for anything over 10Megs per account.)

we no longer do quotas because our bandwidth usage is quite low nowadays:

1. offloaded news server duties to READNEWS
2. offloaded mail servers (three servers) to flexgmail
3. less users. (boo!)

so use what you need. however, if you go over like 1 GIG then well....!

but since day #1, it has always been about bandwidth usage. my thinking was if someone wants more disk space then that means they are using it to serve up more pages/images/files on their homepage and that means....more bandwidth usage.

but now bandwidth is not a biggie. we change with the times. please don't ruin this good thing.

Note: If you want to do something LARGE, then let me know and we could work something out. Via AWS, we got TERRABYTES of storage available...

drop.io To The Rescue

I just answered a helpdesk ticket that brought up something I thought would be a good idea to share with all of you.

Say you got a large file (like 20 Megs) that you want to transfer to a friend on the mainland.

Well, if you tried to do this with flexgmail, you will find out quick that gmail won't allow attachments that large (the limit is around 500K total). And I agree with this! email is not meant to transfer large files!!! being that email is strictly ascii, email programs must convert your binary files (called encoding) to something that resembles text soup that increases the TRANSFERRED file size by 25% (the email program on the other end will decode and your file goes back down to its normal size.)

So what to do?

There is a free service that is SUPER EASY TO SETUP AND ACCESS and loaded with features. The free access requires no messy registration or stuffs like that. 100% anymouse. and you can store up to 100Megs for free in each "drop" (and no limit to the total amount of "drops".)

it is called Drop.io (http://drop.io and pronounced like "scorpio" but instead of saying the "scorp" part say "drop"... is that clear?)

check it out. totally anonymous, easy to setup, can put in voicemail messages, have chats, password to access or not, password to add files or not, can access and send file via computer, phone, voice phone number, have live text chats, have your drop "erase" itself after a certain amount of time, etc.