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I've hit my first real usability snag with the G1. I tried to send a word processing file to someone via the gmail client on the G1 today, and found that I could select only photos and no other file type for attachments. So I fired up the browser and went to the desktop version of the gmail web site, and in the composition window, the button under the attachments section is captioned "Uploads Disabled" instead of the usual "Browse."
Does anyone have a workaround for emailing non-jpeg attachments? This is a feature that I need to use on practically a daily basis. Any developers out there working on an email client, please support this feature!!!
Last edited by atelerix; October 24th, 2008 at 01:49 AM.
I haven't tried the Google Docs route, as I'm concerned about security, and the docs I need to email consist mainly of confidential medical-related information.
As for the emailing of attachments, I find it to b to e a valuable productivity tool rather than a "blight." I guess it's all how you choose to use it. If Google or T-Mobile choose to limit this ability which most competing smartphones feature, it's going to cost them customers.
As for the emailing of attachments, I find it to b to e a valuable productivity tool rather than a "blight." I guess it's all how you choose to use it. If Google or T-Mobile choose to limit this ability which most competing smartphones feature, it's going to cost them customers.
Ok, let me rephrase part of that ... attachments are, like any other tool, neither a boon nor a blight. But, how they are used might be either of those.
In general, when people do things like: blindly attaching a word/excel/pdf/image/etc. document to a message, especially a message heading to a mailing list, instead of putting it into a secure repository that can be shared among the intended recipients (thus saving bandwidth, list archive storage space, individual user email storage space, etc.) ... and especially when such tools ARE available, but they are avoiding them out of pure laziness and lack of initiative to learn and use the proper tool for the job ... THAT is a blight upon the internet. And, in my observation, that accounts for the VAST majority of attachment use on the internet.
If I were king for a year, every mail server on the planet would block all attachments for the entirety of my tenure, to force people to adopt/develop file exchange methods that are more appropriate than email attachments, and ingrain them into their regular use.
Last edited by johnkzin; October 25th, 2008 at 12:13 AM.
you should be able to attach other kinds of files (audio at least) to MMS from the Messaging app. just create a new text message and type an email address. a notification will say "Converting to MMS" and then attach your file.
i haven't found a way to send any arbitrary file via email or message yet. just pictures and sounds.
so how can you share files on android? yousendit, sendspace and mediafire don't work on the browser, i think because of a lack of flash - and i need to send small audio files for work purposes.
(email attachments are a blight upon the internet, you should learn alternatives; frankly, I applaud android for blocking them)
That's a bunch of crap. Email attachments are a great way to quickly share information with people. I think that a lot of people abuse it though, and it's then that I agree with you. I work in IT, and even though I see what email attachments do to bandwidth and mail storage, I think email without attachments would be a real headache when you need to transfer a file quickly and easily.
Quote:
Originally Posted by johnkzin
Ok, let me rephrase part of that ... attachments are, like any other tool, neither a boon nor a blight. But, how they are used might be either of those.
Oops, I didn't see your rephrase before I spoke. I apologize!
hmmm, you COULD host the file on your website FTP (if you have one) password protect it, and link it in your email with the username/password - just a suggestion, for now
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As do I. Specifically as an email sysadmin for a university.
Quote:
I think email without attachments would be a real headache when you need to transfer a file quickly and easily.
But, if there was an easy to manage, and easy to use, file server technology (there are a few that come close, but none that are perfect), and if users would just bother to use the correct tool for the job at hand, then there wouldn't be a headache when email attachments aren't allowed.
Something like WebDav* with OpenID and ACLs, perhaps. Or if Google Docs allowed you to store _any_ document type (even the ones it can't directly display/edit), and "mount" a given shared space via WebDav, and share with non-Gmail accounts (I think it can do the latter, but not the former 2), then I think that would work. Especially if there were more solid WebDav as a file system drivers for Linux and Mac (so that you don't necessarily have to download the file from Google Docs, you could just treat it like a folder in Finder/etc.).
I must disagree with your opinion that WebDav could replace the ease of sending an email with an attachment though. I like the idea, but there's a reason attachments are so widely used - it's EASY, and isn't that the idea behind computers in the first place (efficiancy and ease of use)? Also, it mimics physical mail in that you can send a "cover letter" (the email itself) and an "enclosure" (the attachment) - I have to assume that's by design.
Here's my big problem with this situation: before I got the G1, I had a T-Mobile phone and data plan, and used it as a wireless modem for a Palm TX. With this setup, I regularly sent and received attachments via email, using my gmail account no less. Now I can't find any way to do this with the new setup, and I suspect this limitation was intentionally put in by T-Mobile. This is a shame, because I love everything else about the G1 and Android, but if I can't find a workaround, I'll probably end up returning the phone. I'm hoping that if T-Mobile doesn't get the message and lift this limitation, maybe a third-party developer will come up with a fix.
See the OP, to summarize "I tried to send a word processing file to someone via the gmail client on the G1 today, and found that I could select only photos and no other file type for attachments. "
haven't tried k9, docs2go does not work (except for doc's that they can open).
looking all over creation for basic functionality doesn't exactly thrill me. how exactly am I supposed to run a mobile office without this ability? sheesh.
I tried the other applications that were mentioned as well, with no luck sending attachments.
I did finally find an application that will do it though. It's called Gravel Mail. The only thing this application does, in fact, is just send attachments as an e-mail.
You have to search on Android Market for "Gravel Mail" or just "Gravel". There are so many e-mail applications out there now (Perhaps that why it's hard to find???).
Hope that helps.
Richard
Last edited by Richard Schilling; January 3rd, 2010 at 01:06 AM.
I agree that this is a MAJOR problem and going to be a hurdle that Google MUST overcome if they want to see Android compete in the corporate market. Not being able to simply attach a PDF file to an email is, quite simply, ludicrous.
there's a reason attachments are so widely used - it's EASY
1) It's also easy to just drive your car, never changing the oil, checking the brakes, etc. That doesn't mean it's the proper way to handle the tool (your car).
Easy is not necessarily correct.
2) It's also easy to prop doors open when you're moving into/out of a building. They heavily discourage this at dorms in urban college campuses. Sure, it's easy. And every year, someone does it. And every year, some local criminal uses it as an easy way to sneak into the building. If everyone's lucky, it only results in some theft. It occasionally results in a rape.
Easy is often "not safe". (easy is, in fact, often the opposite of safe/secure).
Both of those lessons apply to email attachments. Email is not a "file transfer protocol", nor a "file sharing protocol". It also offers little to no protection of the message in-transit (there are ways around that, but none of them are perfect, and none of them offer long term protection), meaning it's also not a safe mechanism for file sharing/protection. It also offers no optimizations nor integrations with file management mechanisms, making it a resource pig when it comes to trying to shoe-horn "file storage/sharing/transfer" into email protocols.
Really. People who think that email is "a great way to share files" are on the same intellectual level as people who drive their cars, without maintenance, until the engine literally falls apart ... and/or people whose selfish short-sighted pursuit of their own convenience gets other people robbed.
(no, I don't consider that last bit to be sensationalist nor an exaggeration, considering the number of people I've seen wanting to send passwords, financial information, or health information, through email systems).
For anyone who wants a simple solution, install Astro file manager app. Long press on a file gets you a context menu with a send option, you can choose Gmail or email.
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For anyone who wants a simple solution, install Astro file manager app. Long press on a file gets you a context menu with a send option, you can choose Gmail or email.
Although this works, (a) it only allows ONE attachment per email - there's no way to add another and (b) something as simple as this really ought to have been picked up and sorted by Google a year ago. It really is basic stuff that Google seem to be ignoring.
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Ignoring in favour of pretty apps instead of essentials like email. Why do we need 2 separate email applications on the phone? Why can't we just get a stock file manager and the option to add any file? These are business phones after all.
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Not to quote myself but I just got an update to the Gravel Mail program that let's you send attachments using your gmail account. Works pretty well. Seems to have no problem sending any file you want.
Richard
Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Schilling
I tried the other applications that were mentioned as well, with no luck sending attachments.
I did finally find an application that will do it though. It's called Gravel Mail. The only thing this application does, in fact, is just send attachments as an e-mail.
You have to search on Android Market for "Gravel Mail" or just "Gravel". There are so many e-mail applications out there now (Perhaps that why it's hard to find???).
Although this works, (a) it only allows ONE attachment per email - there's no way to add another and (b) something as simple as this really ought to have been picked up and sorted by Google a year ago. It really is basic stuff that Google seem to be ignoring.
You're preaching to the choir...I'm not excusing Google, I'm just trying to help those (including me) who are frustrated by this current limitation.
One attachment at at time is better than no attachments at a time...
I'm just concerned that Google is going to kill Android by not addressing these issues quickly. There's no way that businesses are going to take up Android if they do a quick search and find so many niggling issues like these that have been around since day one and STILL not being addressed.
I just get frustrated when I see something as good as Android potentially fail due to what seems to be some very daft decisions by Google.
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I have to be able to receive and send pdfs for my business and I agree that having jpegs set up for attachement and not a browse function is stupid. I can save the pdf to the sd card but can't reattach it to an outgoing e-mail.
Thanks for the earlier suggestions I will try Gravel mail and Astro file manager to see which works.
I be the google phone will be able to attach files so it will be "better" than the Droid ot the HTC versions.
To email something other than an image, you have to open Astro, navigate to the file you want to email, tap and hold and you get a menu pop up which includes "Send" as an option. Tap send and it'll ask how you want it sent - I get options for "Google Mail", "HTC Mail" and "K-9 Mail" as I have three email apps.
For anyone who wants a simple solution, install Astro file manager app. Long press on a file gets you a context menu with a send option, you can choose Gmail or email.
This works fine for me... using Docs To Go and relatively small files... it's easy!
I've hit my first real usability snag with the G1. I tried to send a word processing file to someone via the gmail client on the G1 today, and found that I could select only photos and no other file type for attachments. So I fired up the browser and went to the desktop version of the gmail web site, and in the composition window, the button under the attachments section is captioned "Uploads Disabled" instead of the usual "Browse."
Does anyone have a workaround for emailing non-jpeg attachments? This is a feature that I need to use on practically a daily basis. Any developers out there working on an email client, please support this feature!!!
tried ASTRO file manager app... it works... don't have large files... I would just e-mail multiple files in separate e-mails...
It's an irritating limitation. I have Astro file manager on my HTC yet didn't think of this initially as a solution on the Archos tablet. Anyway my market search led me to eFile Manager which also works.
I ended up using the browser-gmail method, which worked well. The big benefit here is you don't need any additional apps installed, and you can directly reply back to the email with the attachment.
Open up your phone's browser.
Go to gmail.com
after you log in, scroll down to the bottom of the page
Select the "desktop" option
Now you should be able to create an email and add attachments like normal
Note: This worked for me using the phone's default browser (Samsung Captivate), but it did not work using the Dolphin browser (did not open the attachment window).
Hi Folks,
I'm a GT-I9100 proud owner. I can attach anything to emails on the normal gmail app with ES File explorer. When you install ES, gmail will automatically give you the option to use it.
Good luck
I have the Galaxy Nexus LTE. If I am composing an email and want to attach a file, I choose "attach", but it only takes me to the Gallery. It would be helpful if Google would make it so you could choose a different location for the file you want, such as Downloads or Docs. I understand you can send it from the file itself, but this is inconvenient if you are already in an email and need you attach something with your reply. Google, please look into this.
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I have the Galaxy Nexus LTE. If I am composing an email and want to attach a file, I choose "attach", but it only takes me to the Gallery. It would be helpful if Google would make it so you could choose a different location for the file you want, such as Downloads or Docs. I understand you can send it from the file itself, but this is inconvenient if you are already in an email and need you attach something with your reply. Google, please look into this.
i have this EXACT same issue! one would have figured you would have been able to attach other files in the gMail application other than just pictures! i downloaded astro file manager but astro canNOT find documents or other files to attach. only pictures! so lame!
it's pretty annoying to see such a great phone NOT being able to do such a simple task. i was so frustrated when i found this out!
1) It's also easy to just drive your car, never changing the oil, checking the brakes, etc. That doesn't mean it's the proper way to handle the tool (your car).
Easy is not necessarily correct.
2) It's also easy to prop doors open when you're moving into/out of a building. They heavily discourage this at dorms in urban college campuses. Sure, it's easy. And every year, someone does it. And every year, some local criminal uses it as an easy way to sneak into the building. If everyone's lucky, it only results in some theft. It occasionally results in a rape.
Easy is often "not safe". (easy is, in fact, often the opposite of safe/secure).
Both of those lessons apply to email attachments. Email is not a "file transfer protocol", nor a "file sharing protocol". It also offers little to no protection of the message in-transit (there are ways around that, but none of them are perfect, and none of them offer long term protection), meaning it's also not a safe mechanism for file sharing/protection. It also offers no optimizations nor integrations with file management mechanisms, making it a resource pig when it comes to trying to shoe-horn "file storage/sharing/transfer" into email protocols.
Really. People who think that email is "a great way to share files" are on the same intellectual level as people who drive their cars, without maintenance, until the engine literally falls apart ... and/or people whose selfish short-sighted pursuit of their own convenience gets other people robbed.
(no, I don't consider that last bit to be sensationalist nor an exaggeration, considering the number of people I've seen wanting to send passwords, financial information, or health information, through email systems).
You can always count on a specialist to arrogantly presume his intellectual superiority and the primacy of his experience and of his own POV. They tend to issue petty, sophistic statements oozing in childhood resentment, lacking in proportionality, tact, and usually truth. These rash statements are meant to convey to us that that it is in fact THEY that are right, that they are the genius tormented by the hordes of morons. But hey, some buy hummers, some become sysadmins...
ANYWAY, I've got some time to kill, so here's some food for thought, if your trekkie/RPG mind can handle it. I wonder if you've seen the light on your own in the 4 years since your post:
* Consider the average computer user, ACE (secretary, mom, physicist, doctor -- anyone who's not a sysadmin or anyone else who actually likes to spend time dicking around in config files and daemon settings like some glorified plumber or accountant). If ACE (not you) wants to send someone a PDF, a Word file, a couple pictures, what do you think is more convenient and faster for ACE? Attaching the document to an email, or setting up a dropbox account + coordinating, or using Google docs (which presumes that ACE is a gmail user)? And don't forget another reason attachments are useful: searchable context. File-sharing services don't offer any of that, or if there is something like it, nobody is using it.
* Apparently, ease of use isn't a priority for you. That puts the cart before the horse. Broadly speaking, software should cater to people, not the other way around. The argument from correctness is a fallacy, and it's an arrogant fallacy at that, one that is dying with the advent of agile where customer use is heavily accented (sometimes to a fault). It's the same presumption that made user interfaces designed by most software engineers unusable and unintuitive. Your job (along the the engineer's) is to make the software work optimally for its current users and their habits. It is not the user's job to operate in a way that makes your job easier. *You* are providing a service. If the service is suffering because of the way users use it, then it's generally a flaw in the service.
* Your examples are riddles with category errors, poor comparisons, shallow analogies. Propping a dorm room open with a book is not even remotely similar to sending attachments. The only thing in common they have is that they make something easy. Leaving yourself logged into your email account on a publicly accessibly computer is analogous (although not proportional). Rape generally occurs between people who know each other (if that is the strength of your argument, then consider that houses not surrounded by a moat makes them more vulnerable to terrorists placing bombs in the basement). Ease is opposite of safe/secure? Again, shallow comparison rooted in equivocation. What kind of ease? Ease of say breaking encryption or easy of logging in without too much hoopla and whizzbang?
* The car example isn't even worth discussing.
* Preemptive strike, because my experience tells me sysadmins are either people with (barely) functioning autism or petty smartasses: I am not claiming that ANY user activity should be accommodated in the formal meaning of the word. Let's stick to how people generally use computers. And besides, computer software can be written to constrain behavior, so easing users into a new way of using the software (perhaps by providing new easy, sensible ways to realize their goals) is fully within the means of software engineering. It's not like users who use attachments are the only thing standing in between you and some utopia.
* Consider that email is a basic staple of what the internet is about (hell, it existed before the WWW did). All the other recent innovations are just that: recent. Most people haven't heard of them. Instead of laying the smackdown, why don't you work in some way to shift people in that direction, if you aren't already? Deal with people as they are. I'm sure dealing with you is no walk in the park.
* Commenting on the intellectual level of computer users in the way you do is shallow, petty, rude, and arrogant. My experience, and that of many people, is that people who present themselves this way are generally of a very unintelligent variety. There's also nothing more entertaining than seeing a sysadmin put in a room with a software engineer. :-)
Summary: Why the snarky lecturing attitude? It might command a kind of silly admiration from lonely teenage boys, but for the most part it merely results in you getting ignored. Instead of being rude, be helpful. If you can remedy the situation by observing the technical limitations of a system in relation to its usage and working with software companies to solve it, do it. If you encourage a reasonable change in usage among users, why not. If it's just a crap situation that you have no power over, deal with it.
Now, onto the main point of this thread: I can also confirm that File Station (which I prefer over Astro for a few reasons) can also be used to send attachments that aren't jpegs.
Just in case anyone is having an issue still - I found that although the gmail client on some droid phones doesn't allow you to pick a non gallery attachment from within the app menu, it does allow you to attach any file from your standard file browser app (mines called My Files) by long clicking and using the pop up menu, or pressing the menu button to bring up the general menu options and hitting the 'Share' button there.
My phone is a Galaxy Ace and it works for me
You can send 1 attachment with the long press, or multiple attachments using share (lets you mark multiple items)
So you just have to remember to do that before you compose your mail!
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just use another email program - I too was frustrated by Gmail's inability to allow attachments of any doc/file on my phone, but using hotmail or my business email client you can attach any file type that is stored on your phone.
Sending email with attachments
