Gmail on Android Getting Handiest Little Notification Feature

Google appears to be slow-rolling a feature improvement to Gmail that will add more information to notifications. Little previews of attachments and a paperclip emoji have started showing on select accounts when the sender has included an extra goodie for you.

Gmail notifications have gotten better over the years with things like quick actions for replying or archiving, as well as the most recent addition of the “Mark as read” shortcut. But there are still more ways for Google to improve, especially when it comes to attachments.

Spotted over the weekend on Android, Google has quietly made this little change that can remove the sender profile picture in notifications and replace it more information that is certainly more useful than a picture. In the images below, you can see when compacted, Gmail notifications can include a paperclip emoji to let you know that an email has an attachment. Once expanded, you should also now see a pill-shaped space to let you know what the attachment is – for example, it will tell you if it’s an image or PDF. For some, this expansion can even show a preview of the content, but I haven’t been able to replicate that just yet.

You may think this is somewhat of an insignificant feature rollout, but the image above shows you just how useful it could be. I have two email counts showing above, one with the new previews and one without. The one without has failed to tell me in any way that there is an attachment to that email. I labeled the subject as “Image test,” but otherwise, you would never know that I included an image there.

We’ll see if Google ever announces this or we all just get it one day and acknowledge it with a nod.