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All these media-hosting and social-networking services are great, but there's been a relatively untapped resource in tracking what you're sharing: your e-mail in-box. Today a new service called Xoopit is opening up in private beta to Gmail users who are looking to not only sort through the deluge of photos, videos, and other files that make their way into your in-box, but add ways to share that media with social networks you're already using.

Xoopit's answer is to have you install a small browser plug-in and give it the credentials to your Gmail account. It will … Read more

Sorting out the overload of e-mail is one of the mostly unsolved problems of computing. The first step is analyzing your in-box, which is what Google developer Mihai Parparita has done with Mail Trends, a program that lets users analyze and visualize their inbox.

Mail Trends, which is similar to Google Reader Trends, extracts data from IMAP servers and displays statistics such as distribution of messages by year, month, day, day of week, and time of day; distribution by message size; a breakdown of top senders, recipients, and mailing lists; distribution of senders, recipients, and mailing lists over time; and … Read more

If you like Microsoft's Outlook e-mail client software but hate the expense of licensing and running Exchange Server, Cemaphore Systems has a proposition for you: a subscription service that effectively lets people dump Exchange in favor of Google's cloud-computing infrastructure.

The product, called Mailshadow for Google Apps, or MailShadow G, is being made available in a beta test version on Wednesday, according to the company. Cemaphore says the product ultimately will be licensed via a monthly subscription fee.

Cemaphore says the service "instantaneously synchronizes e-mail, calendars, and contacts between Outlook, Exchange, and Gmail." Translation: If you … Read more

William Long at Moonlight Blog reports that YouTube is again accessible from his connection in China.

I'm in Osaka, Japan, but a friend in Beijing, who prefers to be identified as "Hot Mama in Beijing," confirms.

Hot Mama adds an anecdote: Last Friday, YouTube was accessible but anything related to what we called T%%% to avoid filters would return a message to the effect of, "This content is not available in your country." Though it would be relatively easy for Chinese filters to replicate this result, this may indicate some effort on YouTube/Google's … Read more

A European body has again told Google that it cannot have trademark protection to use the Gmail mark throughout the European Union.

The European Union's trademark regulation agency denied Google's appeal in late February. The ruling concluded that the mark is too similar to the G-mail trademark owned by German businessman Daniel Giersch. Giersch runs an electronic postal delivery business that goes by the name G-mail, which is short for "Giersch mail."

"There is a likelihood of confusion," the agency wrote.

Google representatives in the U.S. did not respond to an e-mail seeking … Read more

In looking for a program to back up his Gmail account, programmer Dustin Brooks found a commercial program that instead copies username and password information, according to a blog on Codinghorror.com.

Over the weekend, Brooks said in an e-mail to CodingHorrror.com that he was looking for a program that would archive his Gmail account onto his local hard drive. He signed up for a program called G-Archiver distributed by Mate Media of Miami, Fla. Brooks says that after installing the program, it didn't do all he was looking for so he decided to reverse engineer the source … Read more

Updated 4:25 p.m. PST with additional Google comment.

Spammers have cracked the captcha mechanism Gmail uses to make sure you are a human before you can open an e-mail account, leading to a huge increase in the amount of spam sent from Gmail last month, security firm MessageLabs says.

We've all been subjected to captcha programs when signing up for Web services. They typically consist of a box with some characters, either distorted or displayed against some noisy background, and you have to type the letters and numerals in exactly as you see them before the system … Read more

Bill Gates may misunderstand open source, but he's fairly accurate in his portrayal of Google's attempts to get into the enterprise. Whatever one wants to say about the quality of Microsoft's software, one can't dispute its reach. Google, on the other hand, has been king in consumer search...and that's about it.

It's a big "it" but it tends to mask Google's continual failures in just about everything else (Used many of these lately?), including enterprise applications, as Gates points out:

In terms of Google, not to overstate it, but they really don't understand the special needs of business. Today, their economic model is based on consumer search. They have done an incredible job there and obviously we're investing in challenging them in that space ...… Read more

While I've never seen an actual Gmail commercial on TV, Google continues its grassroots style advertising for the Web service. I'm still surprised when I meet people who don't have a Google account, so clearly these ads might be necessary.

This one, put together by the Russian branch of marketing company Saatchi & Saatchi shows two men putting together a massive reproduction of Gmail's in-box, chat, and mobile features made out of various materials including modeling clay, Lego bricks, paint, and fabrics. Other parts were put together with printed paper and some elbow grease. Keep on … Read more