Posted 07/02/09 at 03:07:54 PM by Andy Salisbury

Google recently introduced another tweak to their Gmail interface, allowing users that aren’t quite at home with the labeling system to use them as folders.

With the introduction of drag and drop to Gmail, your list of labels will move from the lower left-hand corner to the upper left-hand corner, directly underneath “Inbox” and “Sent Mail.” Google hopes that this will allow users see them more like traditional folders.

Drag and drop comes into play with the use of the labels themselves. Instead of adding tags to each individual message, you’ll instead be able to drag and drop your messages into the label of your choosing.

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Gmail, Google, Drag and drop

Posted 06/20/09 at 05:08:27 AM by Justin Kerr

Security and privacy advocates have been pushing online service providers to offer better protection for their customers, and to start offering secure HTTPS connections by default. HTTPS allows you to securely encrypt traffic to and from the server, and for example, protects us from having our usernames, and passwords sniffed out on public networks. Gmail offers users the ability to enable HTTPS as a default connection type (highly recommended), but for the average user, it probably never comes to mind. Email accounts have become a primary hub for password recovery, and many people don’t realize just how painful losing control of one can be until it happens first hand.

This could change in the near future as reported by Google software engineer Alma Whitten in a blog post that claims, we are “looking into whether it would make sense to turn on HTTPS as the default for all Gmail users”. Currently, they are conducting research into the performance impact of rolling this out across the board, but this is a promising step in the right direction. Google is also considering making secure connections the default for other services such as Docs and Calendar.

Secure connections used to be considered very processor intensive for servers, but like anything else, this has become less true as CPU speeds continue to climb. "Unless there are negative effects on the user experience or it's otherwise impractical, we intend to turn on HTTPS by default more broadly, hopefully for all Gmail users," the post says.

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Software, Security, Gmail, Google, google apps

Posted 05/20/09 at 04:55:57 PM by Andy Salisbury

Google’s translation tool, which makes translating entire web sites extremely easy, is making its way to Gmail labs this month. Finally, you can find out exactly what those Japanese “happy pill” emails in your junk folder say!

The translation tool reportedly works in just a few seconds, and will translate both the subject and the body of the email while keeping the original intact. You can swap between both versions of your message by clicking a link.

Translated items won’t stay translated though; you’ll have to re-translate a message every time you wish to read it. And, the translated words don’t get cycled into Gmail’s search engine, so if you’re trying to track down a foreign email, make sure you remember how to type the characters type a required key word.

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Gmail, Google, email, tool, gmail labs, Translate, Translation

Posted 05/16/09 at 12:10:52 PM by Justin Kerr

Webmail frees internet users from the shackles of their ISP’s, but over time, our investment in these services tends to turn into its own form of baggage. Years of past emails, contacts, and even the address itself often holds us hostage, and keeps us from making the plunge to superior services such as Gmail. This all appears to be changing today with a new tool being phased into Gmail, which will allow users to seamlessly import all the information from a previous account, and even allow it to fetch email from services such as Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL for 30 days, making the switch even easier.

The feature is already enabled for new users, and will be rolled in for existing customers over time. Previously, Gmail was only capable of fetching mail from email services employing web standards such as POP, leaving Hotmail, Yahoo, and even AOL in the clear. It will be interesting to see if this new feature will make those pesky invitations more appealing to new users.

What is your favorite webmail service?

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Software, Gmail, Google, email

Posted 05/15/09 at 03:45:15 PM by Paul Lilly

For some of you, Google related services temporarily came to a screeching halt yesterday, leaving those unread and unsent emails in limbo. We experienced it too, even though www.downforyeveryoneorjustme.com had us second guessing whether not user error was to blame. It wasn't, and Google confirmed the massive outage, attributing the downtime to a data "traffic jam" in Asia.

"An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam," Google wrote on its blog. "As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions."

Google went on to call the incident "especially embarrassing," noting that it has been working hard to make its services both ultra-fast and 'always on.'

While the search giant also said it's "working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again,"  this isn't the first outage to occur. Various outages have occurred on at least three different occasions last year.

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Software, Gmail, Google, search

Posted 05/01/09 at 04:39:20 PM by Andy Salisbury

Google has recently announced yet another addon to their web-based Gmail platform, which allows you to add roughly 1,200 more emoticons to the selector tool.

Among the new emoticons are national flags, road signs, more animals and various animations. With a total of 13 categories (a huge boost on the two that come with vanilla Gmail) there’s a strong possibility that people will be able to carry out conversations without typing a single word. :\

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Gmail, Google, emoticon

Posted 04/13/09 at 05:05:23 PM by Andy Salisbury

Google, never one to sit idly by while there are small improvements to be made on their own web-based email client, announced this week that they would be releasing a new, experimental feature that would allow users to insert images into an email rather then sending them as attachments.

The new feature, aptly named “Inserting images,” will allow users to send email messages with inline images that show up at an exact, user-defined location inside the body of the message. Once you enable the feature in the Labs tab in Gmail’s settings, you’ll be all set to go. So be sure to check it out and let us know what you think!

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Gmail, Google, email, labs, Addon

Posted 04/02/09 at 10:23:54 AM by Paul Lilly

The launch of a new free email service with the promise of a full gigabyte of storage space was no prank when Gmail was first made available on April 1, 2004, otherwise known as April Fools Day. Five years later, the wildly popular (among techies) webmail continues to benefit with frequent feature enhancements (Mail Goggles, anyone?). And five years later, Gmail is still in beta.

"Google Mail was born out of an experimental project created by a few engineers at Google five years ago," a Google spokesperson said. "From the beginning, we wanted Gmail to be a faster, cleaner, and more intuitive solutin for people's email."

Surprisingly, Gmail has yet to gain mass appeal among the general public, despite having long since abandoned its invite-only system for signing up. Accorded to Hitwise stats, Gmail only claimed 6 percent of the webmail market last year, compared to Yahoo Mail's 55 percent and Microsoft Windows Live at 26 percent. However, Google's Gmail service continues to grow, and to the tune of 43 percent last year according to comScore. 

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Software, Gmail, Google, email, browser, birthday