Embedded Files
When youwent Google, questions like "IT ATE MY ATTACHMENTS!" (all caps) where common. This has ebbed - but forwarding and replying are still a mystery to many. Time for adding a new tool to our toolkit!
Without further ado, here is the test mail that we received. It features a caricature of the Terminator because, well, somebody thought it funny to use it for a Team Drive background (only to find out those backgrounds are extremely narrow).
See how there are three kinds of attachments - Drive attachments (technically links that Gmail displays nicely), inline images (Arnie) and a traditional PDF.
Note that Gmail adds a preview of the "project proposal" and counts it as an attachment - this happens only in Gmail. It's displayed both inside the email and again on the bottom. Expect this second attachment preview to go away when replying or forwarding, as it is not a real attachment (there is only a link, not the Drive file). I suspect the "who moved my attachment" question comes up less because we just use more Drive links.
Let's see what happens.
Forward
Forward
1: original header 2: original body 3: your forward's footer 4: original oldschool attachments (those must come last, apparently...).
The original email is there, uncollapsed. Makes sense - because you are forwarding to somebody who hasn't read the previous thread. This is a good time to go over your email and trim whatever you want deleted.
All the attachments are in there. Everything is intact.
Your subject will be prefixed by "Fwd" for your recipients. Your email will stay threaded for you, so you won't see that.
You start with a clean recipient list.
Reply - what in the...?
Reply - what in the...?
After the initial shock, you'll remember the power of the ellipsis. You have seen the email already, so why show it again.
You are curious though and click the ellipsis:
1: original header 2: original body 3: your forward's footer. 4: Original oldschool attachments GONE!
The original email is there - collapsed, but intact.
Inline images and Drive links are still there, they are part of the email body (an image could be a signature).
The original recipients in "to" and "cc" are still there.
Reply and forward are similar, but they serve different purposes and are really two different tools to make you faster and skip unnecessary steps (like deleting attachments to avoid sending the same attachment back and forth, or cleaning out the "to" list). Perhaps you can do less "reply-all" this way. Thank you for reading!
Page updated
Report abuse