Gmail

On today's show, it appears that the person who caused Apple's stock to drop like a stone on reports of a Steve Jobs heart attack was just "doing it for the lulz." So, he didn't even short-sell the stock? Wow. Stupid trolls. Also, Oprah declares the Amazon Kindle her most favoritest gadget of all time. Wow. Kindle for President?

Report: Teen planted fake story about Steve Jobs http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10074401-37.html

Will the Kindle Get an Oprah Bump? http://www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2008/10/24/24gigaom-will-the-kindle-get-an-oprah-bump-26376.html… Read more

The Gmail team, which recently announced Gmail for Mobile 2.0 and autoreplies, is at it again on Friday with the introduction of Gmail emoticons.

"The black-and-white days of text-based e-mails have had their day," Darren Lewis, Gmail engineer, said in a blog post. "Following the evolutionary path blazed by colored labels, we present, in all their technicolor glory, emoticons in your mail."

Emoticons have been available on Google Chat for quite some time, but this is the first time they've made an appearance on Gmail. Besides obvious gestures like smiling or winking, the new … Read more

Google on Thursday announced that it has launched Gmail for Mobile 2.0 for J2ME-supported devices such as the Nokia N95, as well as BlackBerry phones.

According to a Gmail engineer, the focus in the second iteration of the popular e-mail client was to produce a faster and more reliable experience for users. The online application now offers faster performance and smoother scrolling, with no freezing, Google said. Users with multiple Gmail accounts also can now switch between them without using different applications to access messages.

Gmail for Mobile 2.0 offers the option to save multiple e-mail drafts in … Read more

This is probably more useful than GMail's last goofy new experimental feature (Mail Goggles): Canned responses (see Official Gmail blog). You can now save a reply you're writing as a "canned response" and then quickly select one of these responses when you're replying to a future e-mail.

You can also have your Gmail filters auto-reply to messages for you with these reponses. I quickly set up a filter, for example, to reply to people who send me an e-mail with "pitch" in the subject line with a message asking them to reach me … Read more

Updated 2:45 p.m. PST with Google comment and corrects that company said on Wednesday that it would resolve the problem on Thursday.

Google says it is restoring service for a "small number" of Gmail users who have been unable to access their e-mail for the past day.

Everyone affected by the outage should have service back up on Thursday, the company said in a posting Thursday afternoon on the Google Apps discussion group.

"We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the … Read more

Android may be a freely available open-source operating system, but Google hasn't shied away from the idea that it hopes to profit by subsidizing its development. And with Google's first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1 built by HTC, nigh upon us, it's becoming clearer exactly how.

Google executives have spoken about Android's indirect benefits: the company wants to use it to accelerate the use and sophistication of mobile Internet browsing. "If the Internet is widely available, that's good for us," co-founder Sergey Brin said.

But judging from my testing of a G1 phone, … Read more

Several users have reported an issue in which accessing Gmail accounts causes the iPhones Mail application to crash consistently. Likewise, any other applications that access Gmail, including Contacts, crashes when Gmail data are present. Apple Discussions poster rowanpettett writes:

"I did a fresh restore, and synchronized mail, calendar and contacts to our Exchange Server with no problems whatsoever. But as soon as I added my Google Apps IMAP account, my Contacts started to crash if I scrolled to the bottom of the list or tried to search."

There are three potential fixes for this issue:

Some of the tweaks that arrived with the launch of Gmail Labs are fairly silly (Mail Goggles and Old Snakey spring to mind), but a new option that arrived Thursday makes it increasingly apparent that Google is doing something right with the e-mail service.

The company launched Advanced IMAP Controls in Gmail Labs, a feature that lets users fine-tune the behavior of the IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) technology that outside e-mail services or software can use to access Gmail accounts.

For example, you can limit which of your mail labels are exposed as folders to outside e-mail clients to … Read more

There was an interesting article recently in The New York Times about getting locked out of a Gmail account.

In August, blogger Alan Shimel of StillSecure wrote about his problems regaining access to a Yahoo e-mail account. Suffice it to say that if someone learns your Web mail password, it's a very difficult situation--one that may not end well.

For one thing, the Web mail provider may not know enough about you to determine the true account owner. Worse still, anyone using a free Web mail account from Google (Gmail), Yahoo, or Microsoft (Hotmail) can't expect to talk … Read more