The folks over at Google just love their Google+ social network and more and more Google+ features have been creeping into Gmail lately as well. Today, Google is bringing even more of Google+ to its email client. With this update, Google is especially focusing on adding a deeper integration with Google+ circles. You will now, for example, see profile photos from people in your circles when you select a circle in the left sidebar. You can click on those images to search for email from a specific contact. In addition, if you really take your Google+ circles seriously, you’ll be happy to hear that you can now use circles as search filters in Gmail as well. Say you want to just see emails from your “friends” circle, you can now just type circle:friends to find them.

How useful these features are for you probably depends on how actively you use Google+. We have, however heard from many of our readers that this incessant focus on adding Google+ to just about every aspect of the Google experience is taking a toll on people’s patience. Instead of focusing on the fundamentals of the Gmail experience, for example, it feels as if Google is getting sidetracked left and right by Google+. As Y Combinator’s Paul Graham rightly noted earlier this year, “GMail has become painfully slow.” Adding more Google+ features to it is probably not making it any faster.

At least one new feature today, though, isn’t fully dependent on Google+ and actually quite useful (though it’s also integrated with it). When you search for an email address now, the search results will highlight your contacts’ details as well, including phone numbers, Google Chat status and email address. If you contact has a Google+ profile, this information will stay up to date automatically.

In 2009, Google brought its translation feature to Gmail as a Gmail Labs experiment. Today, almost exactly two years after it first launched, this feature is finally graduating from Gmail Labs. Starting in the next few days, you will see an option to “Translate message” in the header at the top of every message that is written in a foreign language.

You will, of course, have the option to turn this feature off as well. If you always want Gmail to translate a message in a particular language, you can also turn translation on as a default for that language.

Also Graduating: Title Tweaks

In addition to automatic message translation, Google also graduated Title Tweaks from Labs today. Thanks to this, your Gmail browser tabs will soon read “‘Inbox (20) – user@example.com – Gmail’ instead of ‘Gmail – Inbox (20) – user@example.com.’ That’s not a major change, obviously, but for users with a large number of tabs open, this tweak will make it easier to see how many new messages they have.

Gmail Labs Dropouts

Not everybody is graduating today, though. Google is also retiring a number of Labs products. These include Old Snakey, Mail Goggles, Mouse Gestures, Hide Unread Counts, Move Icon Column, Inbox Preview, Custom Date Formats and the SMS in Chat gadget. These experiments will be retired over the next few days.

Google started rolling out its new user interface for Gmail late last year. Soon, Google will migrate even those users who have, until now, resisted this change to the new design. Not everybody is in love with the new design, of course, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that a little cottage industry of new Gmail enhancement tools has cropped up over the last few months. Thanks to browser extensions like Gmelius, which came out of beta today, you can reclaim some of your sanity – and screen estate – once you switch over to the new design. Among Gmelius’ most useful features are the ability to customize Gmail’s navigation icons to show both text and icons, for example, as well as tools to remove Google’s people widget and Google chat from your inbox. Gmelius is available for Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

If you have friends or colleagues who like to write their emails in Comic Sans, you can also tell Gmelius’ to homogenize the look and feel of all your incoming messages based on the default Gmail settings.

Other useful changes Gmelius makes to your Gmail inbox include the ability to pin a link to Google Voice to the top navigation bar and add subtle row highlights when you mouse-over your emails. In addition, you can use the tool to remove all ads from Gmail.

One nice aspect of the extension is that you can choose which of these features you would like to turn on or off. You can download the extension here.

Gmail seems to be suffering from a bit of downtime this morning. Most of us here at TechCrunch haven’t been able to log in to our accounts and the reports on Twitter seem indicate that this issue is affecting users worldwide. On its app status dashboard, Google confirms that it is aware of this issue and that it will provide more information shortly.

Update: Google just provided an update. The company says that the issue is currently affecting less than 2% of Google Mail’s users. It will provide more updates by 11:18am PT.

Update 2: Google now says that “Google Mail service has already been restored for some users” and that it expects a full resolution for all users “in the near future.”

#Gmail should be back for some of you already, and will be back for everyone soon. Thanks for your patience. goo.gl/GSxQt

— Gmail (@gmail) April 17, 2012

Update 3: Google now says that the issue has been resolved. It’s still not clear what caused this problem, however. Maybe it was a network outage or Google just wanted to show its immense power.

According to Google, the service disruption began at around 9:42am PT this morning. There is currently no ETA for when the issue will be resolved.

The current downtime seems to be affecting both regular Gmail users as well as those with paid Google Apps accounts. Google is calling this issue a “service disruption” and not an “outage,” so some users are probably still able to access their accounts.

Developing…

When Google launched Gmail in Germany in 2005, it was quickly barred from using the Gmail name for its email product there. German entrepreneur Daniel Giersch, after all, had registered the ‘G-mail’ trademark (short for Giersch mail) for his physical and electronic mail service in Germany in 2000, long before Google had even announced its own service. Instead of ‘Gmail,’ German Internet users who wanted to use Gmail had to go to googlemail.com. Google tried to appeal this decision, but ran out of legal options in 2007, after Europe’s Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market rejected its appeal. For a long time, it seemed like that was the end of the story, but last week Google quietly settled its dispute with Giersch. According to Germany’s GoogleWatchBlog, the gmail.de domain and the Gmail trademark were transferred to Google on April 13.

Neither Google nor Giersch have commented on whether money was exchanged in this transfer, though it seems unlikely that Giersch would have just transferred the domain to Google without some compensation. In 2006, Giersch claimed that Google had offered him $250,000 for the German trademark rights to the Gmail name.

It’s not clear if Google will now change the official address of its email service in Germany to Gmail.de. It’s worth noting, though, that German Gmail users were already able to use @gmail.com and @googlemail.com interchangeably.

After a similar trademark dispute in England was settled, though, Google quickly made this switch. There, the company also offered its users the option to change their existing email addresses from @googlemail.com to @gmail.com.

Calling email overload “a crisis in communication”, TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington issued a challenge back in 2008: “Someone needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages.” The entrepreneurs at SaneBox read this and other articles by Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet, and set out to build a better inbox. After a month of testing, SaneBox has really helped control my inbox and risen to Mike’s challenge.

Many solutions to email overload have been proposed with limited success. Arrington wrote about a service called “Attention Auction”, since renamed attn.me, where people pay you to get their emails read. Some folks just quit email. Companies try to ban it. Others write short emails and use systems that force you to keep it brief. Some kill your email subscriptions and someone even tried moving their inbox to the bathroom.

Another method to tame the inbox has been to remove the non-important stuff. As the number of emails keeps increasing, the only real way to solve email overload is to prioritize. Arrington manually did this when he wrote how he would “scan the from and subject fields for high payoff messages. People I know who don’t waste my time, or who I have a genuine friendship with” he would open.

Google automated this when they introduced Gmail Priority Inbox. This feature helps, and has its fans, but to me it wasn’t good enough.

Before Priority Inbox launched, the team at SaneBox, founded by Stuart Roseman, was in private beta testing a similar concept. Gmail’s solution surprised them. SaneBox VP of Growth, Dmitri Leonov, recalls those were scary times for the company. Many of their users switched to Gmail, but most came back shortly after.

I tried Priority Inbox, but SaneBox works better for me. It’s not going to magically eliminate all your email or get your inbox instantly to zero. But, your inbox shrinks and you stay focused on the higher priority messages. SaneBox says its moves 58% of the average users email out of the inbox. Your mileage may vary.

When asked why the small self-funded team at SaneBox believes it can solve the problem better than giant Google, Leonov says “this is a very difficult and expensive problem to solve – one giant edge case. The kind of personalized analysis that we do requires a lot of infrastructure on a per-user level, which is cost prohibitive for a free service like Priority Inbox.” After a free trial, SaneBox users pay up to $5 a month for the service, which claims to save people an average of 2 hours per week.

Sanebox’s solution lets you train your inbox, but unlike Priority Inbox, you can see all your trainings and adjust them. It’s also easier, quicker, and more powerful than building your own custom filters or email rules.

By reducing your inbox to important emails, you have less mental attention switching costs. It takes time to switch from important to unimportant emails. So the less time spent switching, the more productive you are. And you can get to the lower importance emails when and if time permits.

SaneBox says it’s like having a very good executive assistant who stops unwanted visitors at the door, keeping you more productive during the day. SaneBox is also modeled on the excellent GTD (Getting Things Done) ideas of David Allen, such as focusing on the most important thing “now” and avoiding distractions.

Before explaining how it works, you need to understand what it is not. SaneBox is not a plugin or a download. SaneBox is not in the spam control business. It doesn’t read the body of your email, change any headers or store email on its servers. Even though most of SaneBox customers use Gmail, it works with almost any email service.

Once you set it up, it scans your inbox headers to determine if the message is important and should stay in your inbox. It moves unimportant messages to the @SaneLater folder (or label) using its own smart filtering algorithms combined with your personal trainings.

Right off the bat, SaneBox works pretty well. If you add your social networks, it will prioritize emails from people you follow on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. If something comes into your inbox that’s not important, just move it to your @SaneLater folder. SaneBox’s algorithms recognize the difference between personal and corporate or bulk email coming from the same domain.

I find I only need to check my @SaneLater folder once or twice a day. It’s much quicker to go through these lower priority emails when they are all batched together. Your @SaneLater emails don’t get lost. You can always find them in their folder and they appear in searches.

SaneBox also sends a @SaneLater message digest list to your inbox at the time interval you set. You can always move an email from @SaneLater to the inbox, and these trainings can be remembered for that one email or all from the same address. Each contact training can be adjusted via the SaneBox settings page.

SaneBox has two other very useful features. Move an email to @SaneBlackHole and you won’t ever get email from that address again. It’s much quicker than building your own custom filter or unsubscribing.

There’s also a @SaneRemindMe folder for emails you want to make sure get followed up. When you send or reply to an email, add addresses to the to: cc: or bcc: like tomorrow@sanebox.com, Friday@sanebox.com, Dec31@sanebox.com, or 3h@sanebox.com (in 3 hours), and SaneBox will send you a reminder email at that future time. This feature is similar to what Nudgemail and followup.cc offers. But with SaneBox, if your email gets a reply, the reminder is cancelled.

SaneBox does have some competitors beyond Google’s free Priority Inbox. OtherInbox offers a free “Organizer” feature that sorts receipts, newsletters and social media emails into folders. OtherInBox was a TC 50 finalist in 2008. I found it took a long time to search through my emails and it didn’t do nearly as good a job as SaneBox. It also created more folders than I wanted. They were bought by email certification and reputation monitoring company Return Path, whose mission is to help marketers and publishers reach an audience. That’s quite different than a startup like SaneBox whose clients are its paying email overload sufferers.

Another player in the space is the paid service AwayFind. Its goal is to get only the 3% of super urgent emails to you even when you are not near your inbox. That’s a different solution than SaneBox which tries to get a majority of your emails out of your inbox.

Here’s a video overview to SaneBox:

So you’re in town to follow up on some weak leads and your boss says you’ve got to stay put for a few more days because there’s an old lady out near Patton Road who is looking to buy and you call back and say you got to get back to HQ for some paperwork and your boss says “Make the most of it.” The only thing that counts in this world, friend, is getting them to sign on the line which is dotted. Am I right?

So you need some new leads, or at least some new people in your Rolodex. That’s where marGenius comes in. You import your Google or Microsoft address book and calendar (don’t worry, nobody else can see it) and it figures out if there are people you need to see and talk to near you, right in town there. Doesn’t matter if the lady near Patton Road’s crumb cake is from the store. You got four more new leads out of marGenius and you can give them a call or even schedule a meeting right from the app and ring a ding ding you’re up on the big board again, at least for a while.

And don’t tell me the leads are weak because they’re not weak. They’re solid. The app correlates people you know with people you know, kind of like LinkedIn, and then helps you introduce yourself. Mitch & Murray didn’t pay for these leads. You made these leads yourself. These leads are gold.

Founded by a small team in DC led by Saurabh Dharia and Sundeep Sanghavi, the app came about when the team members recalled ending up stranded in a strange city after a cancelled meeting. Instead of drowning their sorrows in Old Fashioneds, they decided to build a system that would ensure they never waste time out in Cedar Rapids again. They needed a method to network on the fly and thus marGenius was born.

Although not every meeting set up through the app will bring cash into the company, the networking opportunities it encourages are presumably priceless.

Unlike “free” social networks, marGenius is aimed at actually getting you some business, so they will eventually charge a small fee for use. You can use the app to plan trips, as well, by entering the name of a city you’re about to visit. Using marGenius’ opportunities engine, you can then figure out who’s who on the ground.

The app is in beta and supports data imports from Gmail, Hotmail, and Exchange. CSV support is forthcoming. And next time the boss asks you “You call yourself a salesman, you son of a bitch?” you can keep your head held high and your chin up and your eyes open and you can say to him “Yeah, I think so. And I know so, too, so stuff it.”

Product Page

When Google finally launched the official Gmail application for iOS earlier this month, the tech world sang with joy… for all of about thirty seconds. Almost immediately, reports spilled in that the app was broken, buggy, and almost entirely unusable. Google pulled the app down within a few hours.

Today, they’re taking a second swing at it.

While Google promises that they are “just getting started with the Gmail app for iOS and will be iterating rapidly to bring you more features”, today’s re-launch is mostly identical to the original — save for all the bug fixes, of course.

One notable change: images embedded in HTML e-mails are now scaled to fit your screen and can be pinch-zoomed, instead of spilling off the screen by default.

The app is a bit tough to find in the App Store right now via search, but here’s the direct link.

By now you’re probably well aware that Google released their long-awaited Gmail iOS app today, only to unceremoniously yank it from the App Store when people pointed out that it didn’t really work. Google offered a mea culpa by stating that they have removed the app while they correct the problem, and that they’re working on a new version to be released soon.

Here’s a thought: just keep it. At least for a little while.

I’m sure this must sound a bit petty, but people have seriously been waiting years for a native Gmail app, and they must have been awfully disappointed today. Even if we set the broken push notifications aside for a moment, the app itself was still… shall we say, lackluster?

Several people pointed out on Twitter that the app was just a slightly-tweaked version of the Gmail mobile web view that we’ve had access to for years now. Sure, it had some welcome additions, like improved search functionality and the ability to star emails, but it’s still essentially the same old thing.

What gives, Google? I can almost forgive the notifications issue — we all make mistakes after all — but what’s with releasing an app that offers little (if any) improvement over what was already available?

Now, I’m sure that Google will fix the problem and issue an fixed version in due time, but what they should really do is put it back in the oven, and leave it in there until it’s better than done. I realize that in the grand scheme of things I’m a nobody, but here are a few things I think Google should fix since they’ve pulled the app anyway:

• Fix those push notifications: I think this one goes without saying. You can set up your Gmail as a Exchange account to make push work email, but a more streamlined solution would be much appreciated.
• Fix the speed issues: One of Gmail’s biggest selling points is that you have so much storage space that you don’t really need to delete emails anymore. The Gmail app seems to have forgotten this though, because it tends to slow down when you try to scroll through your emails.
• Add support for multiple accounts: Maybe I’m in the minority on this one, but I’d wager there are a fair number of users with multiple accounts. My personal and TechCrunch email accounts both run through Gmail, so being able to use the app in multiple scenarios would be a nice touch.
• Let us save attachments from within the app: The stock Mail.app can handle this just fine, so leaving it out of the alternative doesn’t make much sense.
• Make it worth using: In short, give us a reason to use it over the web client. This is a chance to really show that Google knows apps and can develop something that’s just as good as their web options, but catered to an iOS experience.

Or not. Like I said, I’m nobody and Google is, well… Google. Here’s hoping that the next version of the Gmail app (whenever it happens to go live) manages to erase the bitter taste that this release has left in my mouth.

A video inadvertently posted to Google’s YouTube account has given a sneak peek at some of the changes that will be coming to Gmail in the very near future. It was quickly taken down, but not before a few screenshots were snagged by Google Operating System.

The new UI is obviously based on the Gmail ‘preview’ theme that it began offering back in June, which has more whitespace and options for tweaking how densely you want your conversations listed.  The biggest change seen in the video is the conversation/reply view, which looks a lot more like Facebook Messages — each person in the conversation has their photo shown, and it’s easier to read previous messages in the thread.

Another key change: Gmail will start surfacing its advanced search features as soon as you click the search box. Before now these haven’t been as easily accessible — you’d have to either click a ‘show search options’ link, or use search operators (“sent:”, “has:attachment”, etc.). Now these options will pop up immediately, and you can also create a new filter from your search query on the fly.

There are some more minor tweaks as well. Some buttons are now represented with visual icons reminiscent of those seen in Android Honeycomb/Ice Cream Sandwich. You can now manually adjust the size of the Labels and Chat windows. And there’s a new slick effect: as you resize your browser window, Gmail will dynamically adjust its layout so that everything fits.

They’re nice improvements, but, as someone who lives in Gmail all day, there are still a lot of changes I’d like to see. In particular, there are some features that Hotmail (yes, that Hotmail) recently launched that I’d love Gmail to reproduce. For instance, in Hotmail it’s now possible to automatically delete certain messages after a few days (there’s no reason to let all those expired deals clutter your inbox, after all).

Update:
Google took its video down, but here’s a mirror, again via Google Operating System:

Google is advising users in Iran to take specific steps in order to re-secure their Gmail accounts after last week’s reveal of the man-in-the-middle attacks that targeted Iranian users. The attackers used fraudulent SSL certificates issued by a compromised root certificate authority in the Netherlands, DigiNotar. These fake certificates allowed hackers to impersonate Google.com and others.

Google was only one of the domains affected in the breach. Attackers signed hundreds certificates for sites, including Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Tor, Skype, Mossad, CIA, MI6, LogMeIn, Twitter, Mozilla, AOL and WordPress. The Dutch government released a spreadsheet with a list of 531 entries of known bad certificates after the attacks. The full list is here on the Tor website.

Although Google, Mozilla and others moved quickly to remove DigiNotar as a trusted authority in their Web browsers, it was too late to protect users from the damage that had already been done.

Google tries to downplay the problem a bit in its blog post by stating that “users of the Chrome browser were protected from this threat,” but that’s not entirely accurate. They were protected after Google moved to revoke DigiNotar as a trusted authority, but there was still a period of time when users could have been compromised.

And the threat may still be present for those who have not taken action. As security research Graham Cluley explains, “even if hackers who broke into your Gmail account no longer know your password, there are still things they could have done while they had access to your email which will allow them to continue to monitor your communications.”

For that reason, Google is now suggesting that its Iranian users secure their accounts by taking the following steps:

1. Change your password. You may have already been asked to change your password when you signed in to your Google Account. If not, you can change it here.
2. Verify your account recovery options. Secondary email addresses, phone numbers, and other information can help you regain access to your account if you lose your password. Check to be sure your recovery options are correct and up to date here.
3. Check the websites and applications that are allowed to access your account, and revoke any that are unfamiliar here.
4. Check your Gmail settings for suspicious forwarding addresses or delegated accounts.
5. Pay careful attention to warnings that appear in your web browser and don’t click past them.

Those who believe their account was comprised in the attack, can begin the recovery process here.

Update:  Google PR responds that warnings issued by the Chrome browser (and others) altered the company to the issue in the first place. And Chrome users were protected from the start unless they chose to click through and ignore the “prominent certificate warnings” in their browser.

This is why Google is able to make such a claim, apparently. But the fact is if Chrome users were fully protected, there would be no need for the extra precautions, in my opinion. Chrome users were warned, yes; protected, no. Heck, just last week a less-than-technically-savvy friend of mine clicked right through one of those warnings (unrelated to this attack) and promptly got a virus.

Yes, you read the headline right, and the screenshots below weren’t doctored in any way. The Gmail feature you’ve been yearning for is here: Gmail now supports three-pane viewing, allowing you to see both your message list and an email’s content at the same time.

Of course, the feature isn’t exactly novel — this is something you’ve been able to do with email clients like Outlook for years. The iPad’s Mail client has offered a preview-pane viewing mode since it launched, and Gmail itself introduced a tablet web app with a similar interface last year. And the native Android version of Gmail offers a preview pane as well.

But even if the Gmail desktop web app is the last one to the party, it’s still the primary way many people access their inboxes, so it’s a big deal.

The feature can be activated in Gmail labs under the option for ‘Preview Pane’. Once you’ve turned it on, you’ll want to click the new button in the upper right hand corner of the Gmail interface to choose between a vertical or horizontal layout.

I’ve been toying around with the feature all morning and have mixed feelings so far. On the one hand, I’ve been wishing for a preview pane for so long I can’t help but feel excited. But between the left nav sidebar, the list of messages, the message itself, and then the right sidebar — which includes the new People Widget and ads — there’s a lot going on in my inbox. I’m finding myself wishing that the far-right pane wasn’t there at all. Which is a problem, given that I doubt Google is going to get rid of those ads any time soon.

There are also a few kinks to work out, which isn’t all that surprising given that the feature is still a Labs project. My biggest gripe so far: if you ‘check’ a message, then use keyboard commands to advance to a different message, the preview page won’t display the message you’ve now highlighted (it’ll just say ‘One conversation selected’). The feature also messed up my left sidebar — chat was allocated too much space and I had to scroll to access my Labels, though this was easily remedied by changing the size of the Chat list to ‘small’.

So it has a ways to go. But I’ll take it.

“I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it.”

Peter Gibbons line from Office Space also served as the slug for my post from early July explaining why I was quitting email for the rest of the month. I was pretty sure I knew how I would feel once the month was up. And now that it is, guess what? That line describes exactly how I feel. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever missed anything less than email.

The past few weeks have been fantastic. Both my mornings and evenings have been decidedly less stressful due to this one little life alteration. Actually, all day, every day has just felt better, not having to worry about the constant stress of getting and (more importantly) responding to email.

When I initially said I was quitting for the month, it brought about a few common reactions: 1) “you’re my hero” 2) “you’re an idiot” 3) “it will never work”. A ton of people I’ve run into over the past month have wanted to know how it was going. Here are some thoughts after a month away.

First of all, yes, I cheated.

As I said in my initial post, I had a number of pending things that I had to follow-up on that were already in my inbox. It took me several days to get through these things. And in a few instances, it took nearly all of the entire month because of delays between the back-and-forths. This, and emergencies, meant I was still checking my email from time to time. But I did go out of my way not to respond to anything I didn’t have to respond to.

Still, there were a few times I had to send an email in response. Looking at my inbox, I did this 43 times over the course of the month. If I filter out the messages I previously said I would respond to, it was down to 11 emails I sent. What were these? Almost all of them were work-related. (And a couple others were forwarding upcoming travel arrangements.)

The fact of the matter is that when you need to send a message to a group of individual coworkers fast, there is still no better method than email. One-to-one messages are easy to do over Facebook or Twitter. But multi-person threads where I needed to know certain people would see my message in a timely manner, required email.

Still, sending only 11 or even 43 emails in response to the thousands I received over the past month warms my heart. Exactly how many did I receive? That’s hard to pinpoint for a few reasons. First, Gmail Search seems to fail when I use the date parameter — presumably because the query is too large (I only see “X of 80″ which then turns to “X of thousands”). Second, during the month, we shut off the TechCrunch Tips fire-hose account from forwarding to my email address, so it would be hard to get an exact figure anyway.

But based on a few different tricks and estimations, I would ballpark it at somewhere between 10,000 to 20,000 emails received over the past month. Yes, welcome to my regular hell.

So, let’s call it 15,000 emails received, and only 40-some responded to. Do I feel like I missed anything, or couldn’t get the vast majority of my work done as a result? Not at all.

For almost all communication, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Quora, text messaging, group messaging apps, a regular old phone call, and the like (even Instagram!) were a more-than-adequate replacement for email. The tricky part was juggling all those different mediums. But all of them are more efficient time-wise than email, so i didn’t mind doing that at all. That probably doesn’t scale long-term, but it worked fine for the month.

The other day, Robert Scoble laid out why he thought I was wrong to even try to quit email. His argument boils down to the fact that email is very malleable as a universal communications tool and Google has some nice tools for filtering it in just about every way imaginable. Both of those things are true, but reading over his list of why email is so great also gave me chills.

None of the things he loves about email sound great to me at all. They all sound like power features that require a ton of work and effort to use. It reminds me of Scoble’s argument for what Twitter “needs” to add to compete with Google+. Twitter’s simplicity is the very thing I love about it. In some ways, it’s the anti-email. Scoble, as the power user extraordinaire, always seems to want features that will make him feel more in control of a service. But really, those features end up controlling him. And all of us. They steal our more precious commodity: time.

Yes, there are ways to make email work for you, and Gmail offers many of them. And I obviously recognize that email isn’t going away anytime soon — perhaps not even in my lifetime. But wouldn’t it be great if we could just dream it up again?

That’s really my big problem with email. It’s not the medium necessarily, it’s the tools built to harness that medium.

Of those tools, Gmail is the best. But it still sucks. It takes several seconds to send even the simplest message. You have to worry about subject lines. You have to worry about properly formatting your message because that’s the norm. You have to hit several buttons. Then you have to wait for a response.

Others have done a nice job putting a prettier face on email, like Sparrow and Apple’s latest Mail client, but the fundamental downsides of email remain.

The newer systems, like Twitter, Twitter DM, and Facebook Messages, are much faster. That’s true both technically and because of the removal of unnecessary formalities. The latter is why I still have a dream that Google will one day build “Gmail Lite”. For now, services like Shortmail are interesting.

So where do I go from here? I quit email for a month, but I never really got to fully walk away. One day, I hope that’s feasible. But for me, like 99 percent of the rest of you, it’s unfortunately not from a work-perspective.

At the same time, I feel like Frodo Baggins at the end of The Lord of the Rings. *Spoiler* (Can you really have spoilers for a book that’s almost 60 years old?) I’m back home, but I feel like everything has changed. Can I ever really settle in again? I don’t think so.

So my plan for now is to use my inbox as a sort of passive notification center. The vast majority of messages I won’t respond to, a few I will, and more I’ll respond to via other communication means that I prefer. You can be fairly certain that I’ll see everything.

Here’s the key takeaway that became very clear in the past month: the vast majority of emails are unnecessary. Even if you think they’re important at the time you get them, they’re usually not. Our brains are just hard-wired to respond to emails because society has taught us it’s rude not to. We think of them as letters — even the icons for apps like Gmail and Mac Mail make us think of them this way. It’s rude not to respond to a letter.

Screw that.

Such courtesy should go right out the same window that the U.S. Postal Service is heading out of. This is a new age, a different medium, and there needs to be different norms. In the past, it was likely that only your close friends and relatives would have your address to be able to send you a letter. And it would take days or even weeks to get there. Email is totally different.

Further, another thing I learned in not responding to emails is something I’ve long suspected: one of the biggest problems with email is that when you do respond, it often prompts another response in return. This is due to the very thing I just mentioned: people think it’s rude not to respond. This creates a vicious cycle of a potentially perpetual email chain. And it often happens fast and furious.

By not responding, you cut this chain off before it begins. And again, most emails are unnecessary, so an even greater percentage of responses are unnecessary. We shouldn’t feel bad not responding.

But plenty of folks have tried in the past to lead a rallying cry for email etiquette reform. I’m afraid the only thing that will actually work is for some new email frontend that forces limitations, to take off. I mean really take off — it would have to become insanely popular. Again, the Gmail Lite idea.

Until that day comes, I’m happy to be the jerk that doesn’t respond to emails.

One of the factors that led me to conclude that I could walk away from email for the month was the emergence of Google+. It’s yet another network where people can now message me if they need to get ahold of me.

Further, Google+ makes Gmail look like even more of a dog. To be clear, Gmail is still the best email service out there — but it’s also still an email service. It’s a service based around technology that is decades old. And while Google has put a better front-end on email and added the killer search functionality, compared to tools like Google+, Facebook, Twitter, etc, email seems a bit like watching black and white television in a world of 1080p flatscreens. I hate it. I’d like it to die.

And Google may help.

Mark Striebeck, Google’s Engineering Manager for Gmail, left a public note in Google+ yesterday letting everyone know that Google is already working on integrating Google+ into Gmail. Specifically, he cites “several Gmail / Google+ integrations” in the works. At the same time, he wants to use Google+’s new Hangouts group chat feature to get ideas and feedback on how the integration should work. Tomorrow on Google+, Striebeck’s team will hold a brainstorming session. Here are his main questions for the integration discussion:

I’m pretty sure that all of you use some email client – many probably Gmail. But regardless of the client:
- What email features would make it easier to interact with Google+?
- How could we integrate Google+ features into Gmail?
- How can we integrate social concepts in Gmail to make the email experience itself better?

Those are all key questions. It seems as if the Gmail team is not only thinking about simple, surface-level integrations with Google+, but also deeper use of the technology behind the service to fundamentally alter Gmail. I’m all for that.

But wait, wouldn’t such integration just be another Google Buzz or Google Wave? If Google handles it as poorly as they did with those services, sure. But all indications right now are that Google has no intention of handling anything about Google+ poorly. Love or hate Google+ itself, it’s pretty clear that Google is firing on all cylinders with this project. And there’s every reason to believe that this will continue into the Gmail integration.

If handled correctly, Google+ could actually be the fastest service ever to go from 0 to 100 million users, as Bill Gross predicted earlier today. But that’s still a long ways off, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here. I just want a better email experience if and when I do come back to email.

Previously, I outlined exactly what I’d like to see from Gmail — that is, Gmail Lite – that still stands. But if I can’t have that, I’ll settle for Gmail with deep Google+ integration.

Update: Due to a “crush of interest”, Striebeck has posted on a slightly altered plan for feedback tomorrow.

Google has just announced that it’s rolling out a new feature over the next week called the People Widget — a small sidebar to the right of email messages that features contextual information about the people you’re interacting with in Gmail. I don’t have the feature active yet so I’m going by the screenshots provided, but it looks like the widget includes each person’s job title, recent email exchanges you’ve had with them, photo, calendar availability, and shared Google Docs. It also includes Buzz updates (hopefully Twitter integration is coming as well).

If you only exchange a handful of messages a day then this probably isn’t a game changer for you, but if you’re constantly having to deal with a flurry of projects and hundreds of contacts, then it could be a godsend. Of course, Google actually isn’t the first company to offer contextually relevant information within Gmail (strange as that may sound). Startups like Rapportive and Xobni have created browser widgets that offer similar functionality.

Rapportive actually includes information from more sources, including LinkedIn, Skype and our own CrunchBase. But Gmail has a couple big advantages: first, it obviously doesn’t require a browser plugin, which is important from a user-acquisition standpoint. And, for those of us who are paranoid about our email, Gmail’s People Widget doesn’t require you to entrust any of your account information to a third-party. Rapportive only looks at the contacts you’re interacting with (and not your message content), but that’s still something.

While it hasn’t always been clear just how big of a bet Google was going to make on Chrome OS, after Google I/O today, it seems very clear that they’re very serious. With the launch of Chromebooks, Google is aiming to strike right at the heart of Microsoft and the Windows stronghold. But they know that one big hold up remains before a browser-based OS can be everywhere: offline access.

With that in mind, on stage today, Google’s Sundar Pichai revealed that Google has internally been using offline versions of their three most popular apps for months now: Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. And this summer, all users will be able to use these apps offline too.

All of this is a long time coming for Google. They’ve had options for going offline in the past with things like Gears, but it wasn’t perfect. And actually, Gears is no longer being supported by Google as Chrome gains many of the same features via HTML5.

Pichai also noted that there are already hundreds of apps in the Chrome Web Store with offline access. And that includes almost every game in the store. This, on top of the built-in 3G connectivity is all vital to ensure the vitality of Chromebooks, Pichai noted.

From this notice, it looks like changes may be afoot to this feature. From AIM’s notice, In the next few days, Google and AOL are working together to change the way you connect to AIM buddies within Gmail. After this change, Gmail and AIM users can talk directly to each other without having to log into both services (you will no longer be able to log into AIM within Gmail’s “Chat” section).

It’s unclear what technology Google and AOL are working on that will allow users to integrate both services with Gmail; but AOL says it is working on an importer to add AIM contacts to your Gmail contacts list. AOL says in the notice: You’ll be able to IM them directly from your Gmail username, but your AIM Username will not show your online status.

AOL says the change will take place in the next few days, but you can sign up to receive a notice when new importer is available.

But honestly, who uses AIM anymore?

Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by AOL.

The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Doc Searls, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — endured technical glitches and a dissection of the disruption formerly known as TV before settling into a debate about privacy. I know, sounds like the usual nonsense, but this show was high quality nonsense. I forget who brought up the famous iPhone/Android hidden recording file crisis, but things quickly got out of hand when one of us suggested that was a feature not a problem.

It turns out that not that many people are aware that when we are on the Internet, everything is recorded. For those who seem surprised by this, all those free apps are actually there to harvest our clicks, searches, and other gestures of our intent. As Doc Searls pointed out, how else does Google make money except by random clicks on Adsense adding up to billions. It’s only when we can’t figure out how to delete our wanderings that people get upset. Me — I count on being surreptitiously tracked so I can go back and figure out where I was last week.

Yesterday, I noticed my Gmail account was insanely slow for no apparent reason. Nothing new here really, so I decided to wait it out. A few hours later, same deal. So I began phase two of my normal routine these days: publicly bitching about Gmail on Twitter. Normally, this works like a charm. Google reaches out and says they’re investigating (yes, fear my TechCrunch power and all that). Within a day, I’m zooming away seemingly faster than ever before.

Except today it’s actually even worse.

Emails are taking upwards of 30 seconds to load. Archiving is taking at least 15 seconds. Search is completely unusable. All the same is true on the mobile site as well. It’s so bad there, in fact, that the app believes it’s actually offline when it’s not.

Anyway, again, none of this is new. I tend to bitch about these things every few months. Here’s me last November, for example — a problem which Google confirmed after my post and quickly fixed. But here’s the thing: why does this keep happening on a regular basis? And why does it take me bitching or a TechCrunch post to fix it? I’m sure this is affecting scores of other users without such a platform, and their complaints likely go unheard.

And before everyone jumps to the silly “it’s free” defense, know two things: 1) Gmail is not free, we’re all paying for it in advertising clicks and/or views. 2) I am actually paying for it. Yes, real money to Google for both more storage and a yearly fee for Google Apps (well, that’s TechCrunch paying, but still). We’re all “paying” customers. Google should be more on top of this.

And I’m sure right after I post this I’ll get an email (which will take 45 seconds to load) that will say the problem is only affecting 2 percent of users. That’s the PR-spin way of saying that millions of people are suffering.

So it’s time for a new deal.

Google, please set a price — any price — that you determine is necessary to keep anyone’s account running smoothly at all times. I’ll gladly pay it. I don’t care if it’s $100 a year or $1,000 a year. It would be worth it.

People often talk about the desire to pay for Twitter either for better uptime or for more features, but the situation with Gmail is much more serious. Unlike Twitter, I conduct basically all my business through Gmail. I simply need it to work for me at all times. And I’m happy to pay for that to be the case.

Currently, I’m only paying $5 a year for 20 GB of storage. Soon, I’ll have to upgrade to the next step, which is $20 a year for 80 GB. The problem is that with this price increase, there’s no guarantee of better service right now. So I’m obviously hesitant to do it. Hell, I’d consider paying the maximum $4,096 a year for the 16 TB of storage if I knew for sure it meant better service.

As for the “why don’t you just switch” argument, it’s tough. Gmail is still the best email service feature-wise and when it’s working properly, no one comes close to it. There’s also a huge lock-in factor for all the people that currently message me this way. Sure, I could forward emails, but really, shouldn’t Gmail just work? Why should I have to switch to an inferior service (from everything but the performance perspective)? I shouldn’t.

So Google, you now have this letter that I’m posting publicly because I currently can’t send it via Gmail in a reasonable amount of time. Set a price and let me know.

Or, if it will help, steal my Gmail Lite idea! Just please do something.

Google’s about to step up its use of “interest-based advertising.” The company has announced that it will change the way it uses the information that it gathers from your scanned Gmail messages. (Or did you forget that Gmail scans every single one of your messages in order to show relevant advertising?) The big change is this: rather than scanning your email on a per-message basis, Google will now begin building a profile about you based on all of your emails. It’s this profile that will then be used to deliver advertising to you.

It’s not hard to understand. Say you email your buddy a lot during the NFL season about how great the Giants are. “The Giants are so great,” you might say to your friend. “Totally,” he might reply. You have several weeks worth of these emails, so Google will have built up a profile that says, “This user loves the Giants, and football more generally. Let’s serve him ads about Giants tickets packages, or Giants memorabilia.” You won’t see ads about the Jets because, well, you clearly have established, in the eyes of the Google bot, you’re only a Giants fan; no point trying to sell you Joe Namath analog clocks.

(Google itself uses a photography example. If you read and write a lot about photography, you might see ads about local photography shops.)

It’s different from the existing system in that ads aren’t served based on a one-off scan, but instead are based on your long-term profile that’s been built. This could well upset privacy advocates, since it’s one thing to accept a one-off, limited scan of an individual email, but it’s another thing to cultivate a profile based on your entire Gmail existence. How much do you trust Google to do the right thing, as it were?