How do I turn off image attachment previews in Gmail?

[daddydave]

In the past week, I've started getting a lot of spam that doesn't get sent to my Spam box, and it comes with photo attachments that I don't want to see. Gmail filters out images automatically if they are inline HTML img tags but since these are attachments, it always shows them. I can't find a setting within Gmail (web version) to have it not show the previews. Maybe there is a user script or add-on for this?

[IainB]

I can't help re hiding or not displaying the images.
However, you apparently only have the problem in the first place because you have some new spam which is not being sent to the Spam folder. So that probably suggests where you need to focus your attention.
Probable quickest solution: If you just ensure that you flag each new spam item as spam, Gmail "learns" what is spam, and will pick things up from there and you should progressively find that these spam emails no longer appear in your inbox.
Try it and see.

[daddydave]

Probable quickest solution: If you just ensure that you flag each new spam item as spam, Gmail "learns" what is spam, and will pick things up from there and you should progressively find that these spam emails no longer appear in your inbox.
Try it and see.

-IainB (July 09, 2012, 08:41 AM)

Yeah, I have been doing that, but it seems each email is slightly different, so it might be hard even for Google to find a common pattern. Most of them seem to say something like "saw your profile" though, so maybe if I create a filter, that will help.

[barney]

Gmail "learns" what is spam

-IainB (July 09, 2012, 08:41 AM)

Well-l-l-l ... yes and no  .  Gmail is pretty good, I'll grant, but it doesn't always recognize source URLs, and has a [bad] habit of not recognizing email subscriptions.  I'll see half-a-dozen to a dozen emails daily that should have come to my inbox.  I literally have to mine my spam folder to recover email that I need, e.g., software registrations, purchase acknowledgements, and the like  .  Daily review does help keep my spam folder emptied, though  .  (Oh, you're gonna say that it deletes all over thirty (30) days?  Not on my box(es)  .)

[IainB]

Yes, it's not real learning. I deliberately put "learns" in quotation marks, because it doesn't seem to be defined anywhere.
My experience is that it does seem to work rather well on my incoming spam. In fact, it's very impressive!
It doesn't catch spam from hacked email accounts, though (how could it?).
By the way, as an information aid I also have this turned on in my Labs: Authentication icon for verified senders. Every little bit helps...

I suspect that @daddydave will have to develop some extra-cunning filters for his spam. In the past I spent hours, and got a headache from exercising my brain a bit and setting up some tricky filtering. That included breaking some rules - e.g., by filtering on labels. Filters seem to be applied sequentially (in ascending order of date of creation, or something), so it doesn't always work out the way you might have hoped it would. The design of Gmail filtering is not really as helpful/flexible as it could be, but I guess it was designed that way for a reason - probably to limit how much the user could screw things up.

[4wd]

Well-l-l-l ... yes and no  .  Gmail is pretty good, I'll grant, but it doesn't always recognize source URLs, and has a [bad] habit of not recognizing email subscriptions.  I'll see half-a-dozen to a dozen emails daily that should have come to my inbox.

-barney (July 10, 2012, 08:42 PM)

You must have one of those email addresses that everyone loves

Of the 10 GMail addresses I have, I'm lucky if I see more the one spam email per month in my Inboxes in total and only about 10 misdiagnosed spam in total ever since I had them.  But then, I don't really get much spam, (>50/month across all accounts), since none of the addresses could be considered a "normal" name based address, (ie. [email protected]), that seems to enabled me to avoid a hell of a lot.

My wife, however, gets hundreds of the things every month and occasionally one real one would get classified as spam but that hasn't happened for a year or so now, very few of the spam gets through GMails filtering - maybe one a month.

About the only thing that really urks me about GMail is the way they think, for example,  p.smith = psmith - if they fixed their system to recognise the period, 90% of my spam would disappear overnight.

Anyway, back to the OP - if you're running Firefox:

• Menu->Options->Content
• Check Load images automatically
• Click Exceptions and add mail.google.com

This will remove all images from GMail including from buttons that use them, (Newer/Older seem to be the only two), but the alt text will still appear if you hover over them.

Mind you, if you're one of those people that absolutely love HTML emails....then I have no sympathy for the mess that will be left

EDIT: You can do the same thing under Dragon/Chrome.

There's also the Image Block add-on for Firefox.

[daddydave]

You know what's really freaky? Gmail itself  is marking these as important. If I mouse over the important icon, it says "marked important mainly because of the people in this message."

About half of these spams have "Creston, OH" or "amateurmatch" in them. The filtered ones I will also mark them as Spam for Gmail too before I delete them.

[daddydave]

Since I have the Stylish add-on installed, this bit seemed to do the trick as far as hiding the attachment previews:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("mail.google.com") {

.hv {display:none}

}

I don't know if the .hv class is used only for attachments or what. Haven't found any bad side effects yet, so it looks like a keeper.

[daddydave]

Anyway, back to the OP - if you're running Firefox:

• Menu->Options->Content
• Check Load images automatically
• Click Exceptions and add mail.google.com
  

-4wd (July 10, 2012, 11:17 PM)

Missed this the first time. I didn't realize you could block images per domain.

[IainB]

You know what's really freaky? Gmail itself  is marking these as important. If I mouse over the important icon, it says "marked important mainly because of the people in this message."

-daddydave (July 11, 2012, 06:21 AM)

Do you consistently mark them down (using the little yellow thingy in Gmail) as "not important"? I thought Gmail had a default rule that something is important, but you can teach it otherwise this way. It works for me, anyway.

Since I have the Stylish add-on installed, this bit seemed to do the trick as far as hiding the attachment previews...

-daddydave (July 11, 2012, 06:38 AM)

Thanks for the idea! I also use Stylish to a limited extent. I had not thought to use it to suppress content though.

I didn't realize you could block images per domain.

-daddydave (July 11, 2012, 06:49 AM)

Nor me (or I had forgotten). Thanks @4wd.

[barney]

You know what's really freaky? Gmail itself  is marking these as important. If I mouse over the important icon, it says "marked important mainly because of the people in this message."

-daddydave (July 11, 2012, 06:21 AM)

Do you consistently mark them down (using the little yellow thingy in Gmail) as "not important"? I thought Gmail had a default rule that something is important, but you can teach it otherwise this way. It works for me, anyway.

-IainB (July 17, 2012, 12:27 AM)

Consider yourself either lucky or well-informed  .  Gmail pays no attention to whether I mark missives as important or unimportant.  It (the software) marks things as important that it has not seen me open for years, and ignores things that I mark as important - unless I set important in a filter, anyway.

Gmail also says it'll remove any messages in the spam or trash folders after thirty (30) days.  Does for my friend, never has for me - I have to manually go into and delete from both my trash folder and my spam folder  .

When I first discovered this, I had three (3) years of spam and trash accumulated ... thirty (30) days indeed  !

On the plus side, I don't seem to have the problem upon which this thread is based  .

[IainB]

@barney: That all sounds a bit weird to me. I haven't actually tested the 30-day thing for ages, as I usually (daily) systematically check through the Spam and the Bin, and check for any material I might want, before expunging the contents and leaving the Spam and the Bin folders empty.
You have gone through all your Gmail account settings and Labs settings with a fine-tooth comb have you? I tend to fiddle about with fancy filtering and such, and it is easy to make mistakes in them and then end up wondering what the heck is going on with my Gmail...     

[daddydave]

You know what's really freaky? Gmail itself  is marking these as important. If I mouse over the important icon, it says "Marked important mainly because of the people in the conversation."

-daddydave (July 11, 2012, 06:21 AM)

Do you consistently mark them down (using the little yellow thingy in Gmail) as "not important"? I thought Gmail had a default rule that something is important, but you can teach it otherwise this way. It works for me, anyway.

-IainB (July 17, 2012, 12:27 AM)

Consider yourself either lucky or well-informed  .  Gmail pays no attention to whether I mark missives as important or unimportant.  It (the software) marks things as important that it has not seen me open for years, and ignores things that I mark as important - unless I set important in a filter, anyway.

-barney (July 17, 2012, 02:24 AM)

Until I started getting this spam, I never saw a message marked important if it was from an email address I never sent an email to, and each spam seems to be from a unique email address. Now every single one of these new spams are marked important "mainly because of the people in the conversation" (as opposed to marked important because of words in the message). This now leads me to believe someone is logged into my account somewhere, spamming the same email addresses my email seems to be coming from, causing the importance ranking to get bumped up, and then quickly deleting the sent emails before I can find them.  

[4wd]

This now leads me to believe someone is logged into my account somewhere, spamming the same email addresses my email seems to be coming from, causing the importance ranking to get bumped up, and then quickly deleting the sent emails before I can find them.

-daddydave (July 17, 2012, 05:19 AM)

Down the bottom right of GMail, clicking Details will show the last 10 or so IPs that accessed your account, (this includes email clients):



I believe you can have it notify you if a login occurs from somewhere radically different, (eg. it alerted me when I went via a Russian VPN), you can also set it to tell you if more than one login is current.

Here:



Also, if you have a smart phone you can install Authenticator and use it to verify when you log in.  You need to activate GMail's two-step verification process, when you run Authenticator it generates a new 6 number pin every 30 seconds or so, you have to enter it when you log into GMail.

I use Authenticator on my main email account, the account I use for ebay/paypal and another account I use for purchases.

[IainB]

This now leads me to believe someone is logged into my account somewhere, spamming the same email addresses my email seems to be coming from, causing the importance ranking to get bumped up, and then quickly deleting the sent emails before I can find them.

-daddydave (July 17, 2012, 05:19 AM)

This might help (detailed steps) - from a DCF post:
Run a security check on your Gmail account - if not already done

[daddydave]

Down the bottom right of GMail, clicking Details will show the last 10 or so IPs that accessed your account, (this includes email clients):
 (see attachment in previous post)
I believe you can have it notify you if a login occurs from somewhere radically different, (eg. it alerted me when I went via a Russian VPN), you can also set it to tell you if more than one login is current.

Here:
 (see attachment in previous post)

-4wd (July 17, 2012, 07:50 AM)

My last ten IP addresses were the same IP...hmmm. I guess it shows the last 10 sign-ons. Also it is set to show alerts and I didn't get one, so that's seems to be a pretty good sign (unless they switched it off, sent the emails, and switched it back on to fool me).

Also, if you have a smart phone you can install Authenticator and use it to verify when you log in.  You need to activate GMail's two-step verification process, when you run Authenticator it generates a new 6 number pin every 30 seconds or so, you have to enter it when you log into GMail.

That's another strike against non-removable batteries. Thanks, I will look into it when I get an Android phone (which may be a while).

[4wd]

Also, if you have a smart phone you can install Authenticator and use it to verify when you log in.  You need to activate GMail's two-step verification process, when you run Authenticator it generates a new 6 number pin every 30 seconds or so, you have to enter it when you log into GMail.

-4wd (July 17, 2012, 07:50 AM)

That's another strike against non-removable batteries. Thanks, I will look into it when I get an Android phone (which may be a while).

-daddydave (July 18, 2012, 11:50 AM)

You can still activate the two step verification, for non-smart phones they send a pin via SMS to the mobile you register with them.

Once activated, any program that accesses your GMail account, (eg. email clients, etc), will need to have their own individual password which you can generate, (they send instructions for all this), they also provide "emergency" access to your account via one time verification codes, eg. in case you left your phone somewhere.



Each code can be used once only, you can generate another ten whenever you like.

That's another strike against non-removable batteries. Thanks, I will look into it when I get an Android phone (which may be a while).

Both of my Android phones have removable batteries but then both of them together cost less than AU$150 unlocked, ie. they're not the super-duper-do-everything-cinema-experience-gotta-have-the-latest-phones.