Gmail will no longer wait for your permission to "display images below."
Google rolled out improvements to how Gmail handles images on Thursday, specifically related to its automatic display of pictures within emails. From now on, you'll never see that pesky prompt again.
The message was initially aimed to protect Gmail users from unknown senders who may try to compromise the security of your computer or mobile device using images.
Now, all images are checked for viruses and malware ahead of time, so it doesn't matter whether the picture came from someone you know. Google is now serving images through its own secure proxy servers, instead of directly from external host servers.
You can choose to authorize image display on a per-message basis by hitting the “Ask before displaying external images” option under the General tab in Settings. This option will also be set as the default for users who previously selected “Ask before displaying external content.”
If you don’t like the sound of this change (maybe you’re worried about being trolled and pranked), don’t worry. While Google will soon flip the switch to make images show up by default, it is still providing the option to revert the change.
The update is available on the desktop version of Gmail on Thursday and the change will be rolling out to Gmail for mobile apps in early 2014.
Image: Gmail, Flickr