New in Labs: Inserting images

It's not shown up in the UK just yet, but I'm guessing that Posterious will handle this automatically:
 
Well, it's about time. You no longer have to use workarounds to put images into your messages or attach images when you really want to inline them. Just turn on "Inserting images" from the Labs tab under Settings, and you'll see a new toolbar icon like this:



Make sure you're in rich formatting mode, or it won't show up. Click the little image icon, and you can insert images in two ways: by uploading image files from your computer or providing image URLs.

Keep in mind that Gmail doesn't show URL-based images in messages by default to protect you from spammers, so if you're sending mail to other Gmail users, they'll still have to click "Display images below" or "Always display images from ..." to see images you embed.

Got feedback on inserting images? Send it our way.

(Via the Official Gmail Blog)
Tagged gmail google

Google Checkout is Evil

Amy Hoy highlights a significant problem with Checkout's human-free fraud prevention system and Google's Kafkaesque unaccountability:

 

Google is Evil, Worse than PayPal: Don't use Google Checkout for your business


Wanting to offer an alternative to PayPal, we set up a Google Checkout account for people to buy our ebook.
The last email we received about our Google Checkout account was "Helpful tips regarding your first Google Checkout orders" on February 9th.
But a few days ago, I logged in, and this is what greeted me:


And if you click that link, "I had pending payouts for charged orders. Will I receive these payouts?", you'll see that the answer is "Nope, you're screwed."

So, to sum up our experience with Google Checkout:
  • they did not try to contact us to resolve any issue
  • there's no way to find out why they closed our account, due to "security reasons"
  • there was no notice (we found out by accident, when we tried to pay for something with Google Checkout)
  • they kept over $200 of our money
  • there is no appeal
  • there is no one we can contact
  • we cannot open a new account
  • our money is gone, even though people have received their products


For Amy's sake, I hope somebody influential within Google gets to hear about this, let alone the countless millions of other small businesses across the world who can easily fall foul of Google's 'secret' procedures.

You'd have thought Google would be eager to fix this ludicrous 'Catch 22' before online businesses lose trust in Checkout...

Tagged google