Posted on Thursday 26 February 2009
Trying to attach a small GIF to an e-mail message I was sending today, Gmail came up with a red “Attachment failed” message. Really? It’s like 3kb. You can’t attach that? Is Gmail blocking GIF file attachments now for some odd reason? Am I missing some news about a 0-day GIF exploit?
They gave me links next to it to retry or remove the attachment, but no matter how many times I retried it, it always failed. This was a new one. There was also a help link next to it, which takes you to a Google help page about “Advanced attachment errors.” The help page isn’t very detailed:
If you’re seeing error messages while uploading files, make sure you have Flash installed. Visit http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ to check for updates and download the latest version.
You can also use the basic attachment features by clickint the Settings link in Gmail. The attachment setting is located in the General tab.
Yes, Google’s help page really spells “clicking” as “clickint” — somebody’s sleeping on the job over there.
Well, I definitely have Flash 10 installed, and it works fine on other sites. Gmail’s chat notification sound is Flash-based, and that works fine. It looks like Gmail put in new file attachment code with Flash that gives you an upload progress bar and lets you upload multiple files at once. But it just doesn’t work, at least for me.
Going into the Gmail settings and changing it to use “Basic attachment features” instead of the advanced ones let me attach files to my e-mails again. Happy times.
Between the new Flash attachment code that’s clearly not ready for prime time, the typos on the help page that explain how to fix it, and the hours of Gmail downtime a few days ago, they’re just not inspiring confidence these days.
Not to mention that the Gmail downtime led to much confusion on my Blackberry. Google was trying to send my Blackberry to a “sorry, your request looks like an automated request from a virus” page where it was asking me to enter a captcha. That worked fine from the Blackberry’s web browser with Gmail over the web, but not so much with Gmail’s Blackberry app. The application was redirected to sorry.google.com which should display the captcha, but the application apparently never expected to be sent there, and wasn’t able to display it. So I was just locked out of Gmail from Google’s own Blackberry application for a few hours until it cleared up.
Not the best of weeks for Gmail. Let’s hope next week is smoother sailing.
MILD UPDATE: Google has now posted about the new attachment feature on the Gmail blog, but there’s no mention of it not working right. I guess I’m just in some special minority for whom it fails. I feel so special.