Google Updates Gmail App With Better Google Drive Integration

While sharing documents and files between Gmail and Google Drive has been a nearly seamless experience on the web for some time, integration between the two apps on the mobile side has been lacking— until now.

Google rolled out an update to Gmail's iOS app Thursday that makes it easier for users to view and share documents and files between Drive and Gmail.

Gmail users on iOS can now view and save files on Google Drive directly from the Gmail app with "Save to Drive" and "Insert from Drive" options. Users can also now edit a file's sharing settings from within the Gmail app.

"The apps will even tell you if your file isn’t shared with the person you’re sending it to so you can change the sharing settings before you send it," Google software engineer, Simon Forsyth, explained in a blog post.

The update also brings new account management options for users who have multiple Gmail accounts. Those who have more than one account can choose which accounts appear within the app while remaining signed into the account elsewhere on their device.

Gmail's settings menu has also been tweaked so users can swap out their profile photo from within the app. The updated iOS app is available in the App Store. A similar update rolled out to Gmail's Android users earlier this month.

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You Can Now Access Gmail in 71 Languages

Google is adding 13 additional languages to Gmail, bringing its total language count to 71, the company announced on Monday.

Gmail — which now covers languages spoken by 94% of the world's Internet population — can now be formatted to Afrikaans, Armenian, Azerbaijani (Azeri), Chinese (Hong Kong), French (Canada), Galician, Georgian, Khmer, Lao, Mongolian, Nepali, Sinhala and Zulu.

Users can switch to any one of the 71 languages, regardless of where they live. For example, if you're trying to learn Spanish or want to brush up on your Canadian French, Gmail lets you make the change.

To do so, visit the Settings option in Gmail and it's the first option under the "General" tab.

Google representatives said in a blog post that the company worked closely with linguists to make sure the tone and style for the additional languages were on point — all languages have their own nuances.

"For example, both Hong Kong and Taiwan use traditional Chinese characters," the blog post reads. "However, you’ll notice that Gmail’s new Chinese (Hong Kong) language uses 收件箱 for “Inbox” instead of 收件匣, which is a word more common in Taiwan."

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Google Apps Users Can Now Get End-to-End Email Encryption

Google on Thursday announced a new partnership that will bring full scale encryption to Google Apps.

Working with email data protection company Zix, Google has launched a new commercial product for Google Apps accounts dubbed Google Apps Message Encryption (GAME).

Although Google already supports secure, encrypted messages within its servers, email messages sent to other systems are not encrypted.

Organizations or users can use various workarounds to add PGP (public-key cryptography) to their messages, but those solutions are kludgy and not ideal for an organization with lots of users.

With GAME, Google and Zix are hoping to change that. GAME is available for $35 a year per user and allows Google Apps admins to configure encryption settings and routes from the Google Apps dashboard.

In a post-Snowden world, it's easy to think email encryption is primarily useful to keep prying eyes (such as the NSA) from intercepting messages. For regulated industries however, encrypted communications are an important part of doing business.

Many of Zix's customers are hospitals, banks and government organizations and its product for compliance with federal regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and PCI-DSSS.

This isn't the first time Google has offered a message encryption product for its enterprise customers. GAME is a successor to another Zix-powered product, Google Message Encryption (GME). GME was part of the Postini suite of tools for email and web security. Unlike GAME, however, GME was never directly integrated with Google Apps. Instead, Google Apps admins had to login to the Postini dashboard to set-up policies and rules.

Since 2012, Google has been in the process of transitioning its Postini services to the Google Apps platform. GAME is the result of that transition that works natively with the Google Apps.

For organizations that need to send end-to-end encrypted messages, having an option built directly into Google Apps is a great feature. With any luck, we might eventually see this option trickle-down to traditional Gmail users.

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Gmail Makes Sending Mobile Photos Much Easier

Google users who back up their smartphone and tablet photos on Google+ will be able to add them to Gmail messages much more quickly.

Now, you can insert an assortment of pictures or photo albums directly into email, resize them within the message and make sharing with friends and family less of a time-consuming process overall.

The catch, of course, is that you have to use Google+'s Auto Backup feature for photos.

Google launched a new feature on Monday within the "Insert Photo" button on the bottom of Gmail messages that brings up photos backed up from mobile devices.

After selecting the button, a grid of photos pops up that allows you to select photos or entire albums to add to emails.

You can also resize images while creating a message by dragging the corners to find the size you want.

Not everyone has the new feature yet, but Google said it's rolling out to all accounts on Tuesday. If you aren't backing up photos via Google+ or you don't use the platform at all, this might actually be a good reason to take the platform and tool out for a spin.

Image: GMAIL

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Gmail Will Never Ask You to 'Display Images Below' Again

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

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