Google rolled out a major change today, images will be displayed automatically when you view emails in your Gmail inbox. The long time reason for not displaying images from unapproved senders was because of security risks associated with images. The most common type of digital image, .jpeg is capable of being encoded with viruses and redirect scripts to hijack a users computer. 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.
An example in action:
Users who still want to give Google an OK before viewing an image can select the “Ask before displaying external images” under the general tab in settings.
The update is available on the desktop version of Gmail on starting today and will come to mobile apps for Android and iOS in early 2014.
What does this mean for your business?
