I’ve been a happy Gmail user for years, and never had any complaints about its ability to separate legitimate emails from spam. Nevertheless, I’ve made a habit out of regularly checking my spam folder out of fear of missing important emails, even though I used to have to recover only one or maybe two messages per month. Now I’m glad I made a habit out of doing that.
Since about a week and a half ago, I’ve noticed that legitimate emails are being marked as spam at increasing rates, to the degree where I have to check my spam folder as often as my regular inbox in order not to miss breaking news from sources or via our contact page, or even emails from TechCrunch colleagues. → Read More
[France] Kwaga, which offers a semantic email organiser, has announced that users of its Kwaga Birdseye product can log in without handing over their Gmail password. That’s because the service now supports Google’s newly rolled out implementation of the OAuth standard, a first for a European company, says Kwaga.
The Paris-based startup was a third-party developer tester and worked with Google’s Eric Sachs and team to fine tune the implementation of the protocol for both Gmail and Google apps accounts within Kwaga. The result is that subscribers to the service just need to type in their Gmail address, including Enterprise accounts (Google Apps for Your Domain) where they’ll be redirected to the Gmail dashboard and asked to grant access without ever revealing their password. → Read More
This morning, Gmail users are getting one more weapon in the fight against phishers and malware. In a blog post, Google has announced that it is adding a new feature that alerts users when the service detects “suspicious account activity”. Namely, Gmail will now give users a warning if it detects that they’re accessing their accounts from two different geographic regions within a short amount of time (credit cards often do the same thing).
The feature takes advantage of the IP tracking that Google launched back in July 2008, which lets users see the last few IP addresses to access their account. This doesn’t provide amazing accuracy (in the US it only displays what state you’re in), but it should at least help users detect attacks from across the country or abroad. → Read More
During the Behind the Scenes of Gmail panel today at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, team member Jonathan Perlow made a revelation that will be a huge relief to power Gmail users: things will soon get a lot faster.
When addressing the question, “why is Gmail slow?,” Perlow asked the audience to raise their hands if they thought Gmail was too slow. A solid number of people raised their hands. Perlow said that the reason everyone didn’t is because slowness is really only an issue for power users of the service — those with hundreds of thousands or even millions of messages. As someone approaching 100% usage of my Gmail inbox, I know this problem well. → Read More
Today at the Gmail Behind The Scenes panel at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, key team members of the Gmail team revealed the true secret of the service: Shit umbrellas.
Product manager Todd Jackson made the humorous revelation when explaining how the Gmail team works as a group of about 100 people, the vast majority of which are engineers. “You can either be a shit funnel or a shit umbrella,” Jackson says. → Read More
Earlier this week, we reported on a number of new security enhancements that we expect Gmail to launch in the next few days, including oAuth support. It looks like we were right: a small startup called Etacts, which launched last month, has just implemented oAuth for Gmail IMAP accounts, allowing Etacts to securely tap into your email without the security risks associated with handing over your Gmail password. This appears to be the first public implementation of Gmail IMAP oAuth support. For email services, this is a big deal. We expect Google to announce support for the new feature more broadly this week.
So why does this matter? Etacts is a powerful tool for making sure you keep in touch with the friends, family, and business associates that are important to you. But at launch, it came with one significant flaw: it required users to hand over their Gmail account passwords (without them, the service wouldn’t be able to automatically pull in your new email). Even though Etacts seems trustworthy, handing over a password carries risks — if the service was ever hacked, there’s a small chance your password could have been compromised. With oAuth, this isn’t an issue. → Read More
If your Gmail account is down or consistently throwing random errors your way, like my account is right now, note that it isn’t just you. According to the Apps Status Dashboard, a “significant subset of users” started running into trouble at around 9:45 AM Pacific Time.
At 11:34 PM, Google posted an update, saying that Google Mail service had been restored for some users, and that it expected a resolution for all users “within the next 4 hours” (estimate). → Read More
Gmail is known for launching a plethora of nifty little features through Labs that make the email platform more attractive and easy to use. In total, Gmail Labs has 60 features that can be turned on and off and is steadily adding more enhancements. Yesterday, Google announced that six features will be graduating from Labs and will become regular features of Gmail. And Google will also be retiring five features. The decisions were made based on usage and user feedback. Here are the graduating and retiring features: → Read More
As you might have heard earlier today, Google made another acquisition — the email search startup reMail. While its topical description may make it seem like an obvious buy, there’s another layer that makes this really interesting. reMail isn’t just any email search startup, it’s a startup working to perfect email search on the iPhone. Or rather, it was.
Here’s the key part of reMail founder Gabor Cselle’s post about the acquisition today: “Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail’s iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store.” Yep, it looks like this may be another battle in the Apple-Google mobile war. → Read More
Yesterday, we saw Microsoft shamelessly go after the iPhone with a video which played at Mobile World Congress for its new Windows Phone 7 Series. But it’s not just Apple that Microsoft is taking on with videos, it’s competitors like Google and OpenOffice.org as well.
On the Microsoft Office Videos channel on YouTube, you’ll find a series of videos which find Microsoft aggressively going after its competition. For example, here’s one in which Microsoft Office is compared to Google Apps and specifically, Google’s “low-cost” email service. Office, it seems deals with “real world” issues, Google Apps (and specifically Gmail) do not, according to the video. → Read More
Merging something designed for public broadcasting (Buzz) with something inherently private (Gmail) was just looking for trouble.
Google is -deservedly – getting a lot of heat for the fact that its latest social product has a number of privacy flaws baked into it by design.
They’ve since made some improvements to the product, but that’s not where the story ends. → Read More
Today may look like February 11 to you and I, but to Iranians it’s 22 Bahman, the anniversary of the declaration of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It’s sorta analagous to the 4th of July here in the U.S., in that it commemorates the “birth,” so to speak, of the country. As such, there’s massive pro- and anti-government demonstrations going on in Tehran. Fun stuff to observe from a safe distance away. The country’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who’s really more of a figurehead than anything else, declared, among other things, that the country is now a “nuclear state,” and that it will treble its production of enriched uranium. The country’s telecommunication agency has also used the event to announce the banning of Gmail, while simultaneously encouraging citizens to move to its officially supported e-mail service, mail.ir. → Read More
The Iranian government has officially banned the use of Gmail in the country, reports The Wall Street Journal. In place of Google’s email platform, Iran will allow citizens to use a State-sponsored national email service.
The ban coincides with the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Republic, which is expected to draw mass protests and riots from citizens who are both for and against the regime. Last summer, during the controversy surrounding the Iranian elections, Iran banned social network FriendFeed. Facebook was also banned around election time. As many other communications outlets were blocked around this time period, Iranian citizens took to Twitter as the main tool of choice to spread information about what is going on. → Read More
[Ukraine] We know Skype is a great tool. It has over 500 million users worldwide. But even Skype has some feature gaps. In fact Skype has no internal call recording capabilities so that produced a variety of call recorders in the Skype ecosystem – from complex to buggy, from expensive to free. But what is the most common characteristic of the tools? They lock users into the computers they are installed in, hardly appropriate in a Cloud computing era. Users who want to access their call recordings or chats from another PC (e.g. home/work) are stuck. If you change a computer or reinstall Windows your Skype history will be irreversibly lost.
Fortunately there is a tool that effectively resolves both drawbacks – G-Recorder is a lightweight and simple Windows (only) application that records Skype calls and chats to Gmail. Its innovation is in integrating a user-friendly Gmail interface to handle Skype conversations like e-mail. → Read More
Orli Yakuel noticed that Google has quietly added a new icon in the ‘Compose Mail’ window of its free webmail service Gmail, enabling users to run search queries from within the interface and insert results and URLs straight into drafted e-mails or open chat conversations.
This is an expansion of a Google Labs feature, simply dubbed ‘Google Search’, that was introduced back in April 2009 as an optional setting in Gmail. → Read More
Google has a funny little blog post today on the Gmail Blog. Apparently, they’ve decided to change the way they’re serving advertisements in Gmail. Why? They say it’s in the name of serving ads that are more relevant to users. But really, it’s fairly obvious that it’s about serving ads that will bring in more money.
In the example they give, Google says that if you previously read an email confirming a hotel in Chicago, and were served an ad about flights to Chicago in Gmail, you might see that same ad when you’re reading an email wishing you a happy birthday. The thought is that there wouldn’t be a good ad to serve you related to this birthday message. That’s probably not true — instead, it’s probably an ad with much lower click rates (and CPC rates) that makes Google less money. → Read More
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Google is ending its censorship in China and as a result, may have to pull out of the country. As you also may have heard, this is the direct result of the attempted hacking of some Gmail accounts. Google obviously takes its security seriously, and they’ve made that more clear by announcing that all Gmail accounts will now default to the encrypted version of the service.
Specifically, once Google is done rolling this out to its users (it’s in the process of doing it now), the default URL for Gmail will include HTTP Secure (you can tell by looking at the url and seeing if it begins with “https”). “Using https helps protect data from being snooped by third parties, such as in public wifi hotspots,” Google writes today on its Gmail Blog. And while this wouldn’t have stopped the type of Gmail hacking that it seems was going on in China, it does make the service significantly more secure. Anytime you hear the words “hacking” and “Gmail” in the same sentence, it’s not good for Google as it attempts to convince everyone in the world that cloud-based email is the way to go. So a move like this following the China situation is a smart one. → Read More
Short Version: The GBoard costs $19.99. It’s a USB keypad that has nineteen specially labeled keys for specific GMail actions: search, reply, reply all, star, archive, etc. The back of the unit has an adjustable lever so you can change the angle of the keypad. I’m left wondering what problem this accessory solves. → Read More
Gmail is furthering its offline strategy today with the announcement of the ability to include attachments in composed emails when offline. Google says this was one of the most requested features for Offline Gmail and starting today, you be able to attach files in offline mode the way you would in online Gmail.
You’ll be able to attach all types of files except inline images, which are images in the body of the email. When you have Offline Gmail enabled, Google says that mail now goes through the outbox when you’re online or offline, allowing Gmail to capture all attachments regardless of internet connections. → Read More
“Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all.” – Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail, co-founder of FriendFeed, currently doing vague infrastructure things at Facebook.
Today, at our RealTime CrunchUp event in San Francisco, Buchheit and Threadsy founder Rob Goldman sat down for a chat with our own Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld. The topic was: Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus.
So can we kill email? → Read More
San Francisco, CA
