Tis the season for hacking, and [Nick McClanahan] at the GadgetGangster is certainly showing off his Christmas spirit with his most recent creation. He had an animatronic Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer toy sitting around and thought it would be fun to convert him into an email reading machine. He tore open the toy, removing [...]

read more from this topic.....

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.

read more from this topic.....

Thanks to a leak a couple of weeks ago, we already got a sneak peek at the new look for Gmail, but today Google is announcing it will now begin to roll out the updated design to all users. In addition to the user interface overhaul (guess what’s also getting the white space everywhere! look as its default theme?), the newly revamped Gmail will also support improved threaded conversations, multiple display densities, better navigation and search and will ship with additional HD themes.

read more from this topic.....

It’s probably not a good sign that I’m this excited about an email widget, but there you go.

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.

read more from this topic.....

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.

read more from this topic.....

Gmail is in the process of rolling out a new ad system that could prove to be quite powerful: ads that learn what you’re interested in based on your email habits. The feature first showed up in my Gmail account earlier this afternoon (there’s a prompt informing users about the new ads), and a Google spokesperson has confirmed that they are indeed in the process of rolling this out worldwide. Here’s the full information page describing the feature, found by clicking the ‘Learn More’ button.

Google says that while this notification will be rolling out to users gradually over the coming days, the personalized ads won’t actually go live for around a month. In the mean time, users can opt-out of the new system through Gmail’s settings panel (the default is that you’re opted-in).

read more from this topic.....

When Sparrow first launched in October of last year, I raved about its design and simplicity, but noted a few downsides. One was that it was Gmail-only. And even though it was Gmail-only, it lacked some of Gmail’s power features, such asPriority Inbox. With version 1.1,  both of those issues have been addressed. And a whole slew of new features more has been added.

First and foremost, Sparrow now has general IMAP support. This means that on top of Gmail, you can use the client for all of your email. This means Yahoo, AOL, Mobile Me, anything. It even supports custom IMAP from services like Rackspace, Fastmail, Zimbra and others.

read more from this topic.....

Hmm … Maybe RSS isn’t dead after all? After the replacement of the Google Reader link in Gmail with a link to Google Photos caused a user revolt on Friday, Google has vowed to bring the link back and tells TechCrunch its removal was accidental.

And while Google is uncertain as to exactly when the highly dramaticized link will be back, the Gmail team is working hard to fix it and is targeting Monday morning, according to representative Victoria Katsarou.

read more from this topic.....

One of my biggest beefs with Gmail on my Droid (rooted, running Cyanogenmod 6.1.2) is that I could never reply with an address other than my gmail account. I have several accounts tied to gmail…

read more from this topic.....

I own an iPhone. I live in San Francisco. As such, it’s basically a total crapshoot as to whether or not I’ll be able to make a phone call in the city. Skype had always been a pretty good back-up solution, but an even better one came a few months ago: Gmail Calling. And now Google has just extended the free period of the feature through 2011. Yes, through next year.

Gmail Calling is great because it exists fully in the browser in an app that I always have open anyway: Gmail. If you use gChat, it’s right below your status message marked with a phone icon and the words “Call phone”. Hitting this launches a dialpad window within Gmail (similar to a chat window) and you can call any number in the U.S. or Canada for free. In my experience, the call quality and reliability have been excellent.

read more from this topic.....

I’ve seen the future of messaging — it looks a lot like Facebook Messages. More specifically, it looks like the new version of Facebook Messages that the company began rolling out two weeks ago. But I’m not sure that the future is Facebook Messages. At least not for me. Because that’s simply not how I have used Facebook and it’s too hard to switch my patterns now. And that’s why Gmail has a huge opportunity. We need a Gmail Lite.

At first, I was underwhelmed by the new Facebook Messages. But that’s just because I really hadn’t been using Facebook Messages before. I would get a message every now and then, but mostly I would ignore the area. But in the past couple of weeks, probably as the feature gets turned on for more users, I’ve started to get more messages coming to me this way. And as that has happened, I’m seeing the absolute beauty of the system. Namely, I’m seeing the beauty in its speed.

read more from this topic.....

Back in August, Gmail launched what is perhaps my favorite new feature ever: integration with Google Voice, which lets you make and receive calls directly from your computer.

Earlier this month, there were some initial reports that Google had improved on this feature with a nifty addition: the ability to record inbound Google Voice calls directly from Gmail. Now it looks like Google is rolling out the feature more broadly — we’ve polled a few people and they’re all seeing it, and there are plenty of reports on Twitter of people noticing it for the first time.

read more from this topic.....

Email has taken over our lives, and most of us hate it. But a new generation of email apps are changing how we interact with the inbox, and on Monday Facebook might even join the party. The inbox of the future is going to look a lot more like Facebook than the one you’re using today—but it’s also going to do a lot more. Thanks to these apps, you’ll learn to love your email again.

Here are four ways your inbox is changing, with some of the services that are making it better:

read more from this topic.....

For the longest time, all I’ve wanted is a solid native Mac client for Gmail that supports starring of messages. Sure, there have been some out there, but they’ve all been lacking. Today, I may have finally found a good one.

Sparrow is a super-simple Mac client for Gmail. If you’ve used Tweetie for Mac (which is now owned by Twitter, but development is more or less frozen), you’ll feel right at home here. On the right hand toolbar you’ll find a big icon for you account (again, just like Tweetie), your inbox, your starred items, your replies, your drafts, and your trash. Along the top of the window, you’ll see an option to compose, reply to, archive, or delete. Naturally, there is also a search bar as well.

read more from this topic.....

It’s hard to remember a product I’ve become so dependent on quicker than Gmail’s new Priority Inbox. I’m so addicted, that the few times I’ve accidentally clicked on the old “regular” Inbox view in the past week have really annoyed me. So much so that I actually moved that view into my “more” drop down (you can drag any sidebar item in there). And now I have good news: you can all share in this addiction.

While it began rolling out to users on Monday, Google is now saying that Priority Inbox should be available to all users (including Google Apps users) today. Look for the “New! Priority Inbox” message in red in the top right corner of your Gmail account to activate it. There’s a slight learning curve with it, so you’ll still probably want to watch Google’s official video. But once you get started, it’s unlikely that you’ll go back.

read more from this topic.....

Five days after the announcement of Voice and Video Chat service in Gmail for Debian-based Linux distributions, Google unveiled a Gmail phone call service for Windows, Mac, and Linux. more>>

…

read more from this topic.....

Today Google released a plug-in to allow Debian-based distros video and chat capabilities through Gmail accounts. Two years after the Windows and Mac releases, one has to wonder if it might be …

read more from this topic.....

Since October 19, 2005, Gmail has been known as “Google Mail” in the UK. The means that everyone who signed up since that point was forced to use the cumbersome @googlemail.com address rather than a @gmail.com one. But soon, Gmail is going on a UK comeback tour. And the better news: all those with @googlemail.com addresses can “upgrade” to a gmail.com one.

So why the change? Well, initially Google had to stop using Gmail in the UK because of a legal dispute. As they explain here, it was a trademark issue. Rather than offer no service to UK users, Google made the call to go with Google Mail while it fought for the Gmail name. “We are still working with the courts and trademark office to protect our ability to use the Gmail name, but in the meantime, we want you to have an email address you can rely on,” they wrote at the time.

read more from this topic.....

If you live in Gmail all day, you’re almost certainly going to want to activate a new feature that just want live in labs: Gmail Sneak Peek. The feature, as the name suggests, allows you to get a preview of the message you’ve currently got selected, without actually opening it (it reminds me a bit of the preview pane you get in Mac OS X when you hit the spacebar).

After activating Sneak Peak in Labs, either right click on a message or use the handy keyboard shortcut ‘h’, and the preview pane will pop up. You probably won’t be able to see the entire message you’re looking at, but it’s definitely enough to figure out if the message is important or if it should promptly be sent to your archive. You can use the ‘j’ and ‘k’ shortcuts to scroll through your list of messages, looking at a preview of each. My only gripe (and it’s a fairly significant one) is what Sneak Peek does when you actually act on a message.

read more from this topic.....

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 from this topic.....

“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 from this topic.....

One day computers will exist in every part of our lives. You’ll be standing in the shower, lathering up  when Chantal, your holographic computer controlled AI partner, informs you in a cool voice you have a new email. How splendid, it must be the office letting you know there is no work today! “Anything else?” [...]

read more from this topic.....

I loaded up Gmail this morning expecting to see the usual assault on my inbox, when something new caught my eye. Apparently, Google has started inserting favicons, the little icons that many browsers put next to a website’s URL or bookmark, next to messages.

So far, I’m only seeing it for emails from Netflix. As you can see below, their Gmail favicon matches their website favicon. Others are seeing it too, but again, only for Netflix right now.

read more from this topic.....

When Gmail went down today, it caused more than a minor panic. People, like me, who use Gmail as their primary email couldn’t get much work done. There’s nothing like an outage to make you realize how much you rely on something.

So what happened exactly? Isn’t Gmail supposed to have multiple points of failure? Well yes, Gmail has thousands and thousands of overlapping mail servers which can pic up the slack if any one fails because the data is replicated and spread all around. But there are also request servers which do nothing but route the requests for email to whichever server (with the right emails on it) happens to be available.

It tuns out that Google took down some regular email servers for routine maintenance, and because of some recent changes, that overloaded the request servers. Google engineering VP Ben Treynor explains on the Gmail Blog:

read more from this topic.....

Gmail made a tweak last night that brings better contact management to the service. When you click the “To:” or “CC:” links in front of each address field, a box pops up with your contact list. It is a simple change, but it saves you from having to go to another page to find a contact.

Most of the time, Gmail users probably won’t use this feature because Gmail already gives you a list of auto-complete suggestions as you begin typing in a name into the “To:” field. These are based on people you’ve communicated with recently, and usually does the trick. But if you haven’t emailed someone for a long time, their name doesn’t pop up. It also doesn’t help if you can’t remember their name.

read more from this topic.....

Good thing Gmail is out of beta. It is now the third largest Web mail service in the U.S. In July, Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL, according to comScore estimates. (Gmail is the orange line in the chart below). That puts Gmail within sight of the No. 2 player, Windows Live Hotmail, which has 47 million unique visitors. After that there is a wide gulf separating Yahoo Mail and its 106 million monthly unique visitors.

The last time checked on Gmail’s progress was at the beginning of the year, when it seemed like it would still take at least two years for it to catch up to its nearest rivals. But so far this year, Gmail’s unique visitors grew 25 percent, while AOL’s declined 22 percent. Thus, the two crossed paths in July. (Hotmail grew only 8 percent during the same period, while Yahoo Mail increased unique visitors by a healthy 16 percent).

read more from this topic.....

There’s some excitement around the web today among a certain group of high profile techies. What are they so excited about? Something called WebFinger, and the fact that Google is apparently getting serious about supporting it. So what is it?

It’s an extension of something called the “finger protocol” that was used in the earlier days of the web to identify people by their email addresses. As the web expanded, the finger protocol faded out, but the idea of needing a unified way to identify yourself has not. That’s why you keep hearing about OpenID and the like all the time.

But those standards, while open, have failed to latch on in a meaningful way with the public at large. One of the holdups is that you have to set up a website or service you use to be your OpenID. It’s relatively easy to do, and you may already have one ready to go, but just not realize it. But it’s still kind of tricky to explain to a regular web user — wait, you login with your website?

read more from this topic.....

I expect many of you already were aware of this, but I can imagine at least some of you aren’t yet, so here goes: apparently you can lift the usage restrictions from Adobe PDF files by simply forwarding them as attachments to your Gmail account and opening them in HTML mode right from your inbox. That way, you can copy whatever the ‘secured’ PDF contains to a text editing program and do whatever you want with it.

For your reference: PDFs (Portable Document Format) can be encrypted so that a password is needed to view or edit its content, and they can also contain embedded DRM restrictions that provide further controls that limit copying, editing or printing.

read more from this topic.....