Posts tagged google mail
Google apologizes for yet another Gmail outage
Sep 25th
Google has fixed problems that occurred with with its Gmail service which resulted in Gmail being inaccessible to an unknown number of users, details are still unclear about the downtime. Twitter users have been marking the outage with a flurry of tweets. Other Twitter users noted that Gmail was working fine for them.
Google spokesperson said in an e-mail:
A problem with Google Contacts caused many Gmail users to experience slowness and degraded service for about an hour today, Mail was back to full speed for everyone around 8am Pacific and the issue affecting Contacts was resolved shortly after.
Today’s downtime is the latest delay for Google, Google has been working to take some market share for its Web-based Apps services, like Gmail, Google Docs and Google Sites, as solutions for businesses for Internet users.
We’re sorry for the inconvenience. As usual, we’ll provide an incident report on the Apps Status Dashboard, where we also gave ongoing status updates as this issue progressed.
Earlier this morning, the App Status Dashboard said:
The Gmail issue should now be resolved for many of our users. Contacts and chat are still not working. For Gmail users, you can use www.google.com/contacts to access your contacts. Google Apps customers can use www.google.com/contacts/a/yourdomain-name.com.
But again at 10 AM Pacific, Google said at the Dashboard:
We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail, but we’ve provided a workaround below. We will provide an update by September 24, 2009 8:29:00 AM UTC-7 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change. You can access Gmail via IMAP.
Google suffered another service interruption earlier this week. The question here arises, when will this stop or atleast minimize.
Gmail removes ‘on behalf of’ text while sending mail from a non Gmail address
Jul 31st
The users of Gmail’s custom “From:” option know well about the “Sender” field issue. The issue is that the receiver receives the message, sent by using this option, with a sender field as “From username@gmail.com On Behalf Of customaddress@mydomain.com “. This really annoyed many senders/ receivers.
The Gmail’s custom “From:” is used to send messages with user’s other email addresses listed in place of the Gmail address. Since these messages are sent through the Gmail’s server but “from” a non-Gmail address, Gmail includes the Gmail username in the “Sender” field of the message header to comply with mail delivery protocols. This also helps in preventing user’s mail address from being marked as spam.
Gmail has rectified the loud and clear “on behalf of” text. Instead of using Gmail’s server to send the email, Gmail now use the servers where users other email address lives. Since Gmail is not the originating domain there is no need to include “Sender” info in the header.
Now, if the users other email provider supports POP or IMAP access, the message sending will be as follow:
There is a little problem with the new method. What if the users want to carry on with the old method or if their other email does not support authenticated SMTP?
Emmanuel Pellereau, a software engineer at Google, said :
We recognize that your other address might not have a server that you can use to send outbound messages — for example, if you use a forwarding alias rather than an actual mailbox, or if your other email provider doesn’t support authenticated SMTP, or restricts access to specific IP ranges. For this reason, we’ve kept the original method as well. Check out our Help Center for further details on these two “send mail as” configuration options.
Pellereau also explained the procedure to switch to this new method as:
To switch to this new method, go to the Accounts page under Settings, and click “edit info” from the “Send mail as” section. Then choose the option to “Use your other email provider’s SMTP servers.”
Migrate to Gmail from Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail
May 14th
Now it is extremely simple to set up your Gmail and import from Yahoo!, Hotmail or whatever other email account you might have. The Gmail team has added new import settings that make it easy to switch to Gmail.
Now you can bring your contacts and mail from Yahoo!, Hotmail, MSN, AOL and others over to Gmail in a few steps, and have new mail from those accounts forwarded to Gmail for the next 30 days. That gives you time to let everyone know what your new address is. You can also label all of the imported mail, so you know which mail is coming from which account
It’s much easier to switch and you can bring along all your old email and contacts. You can even have your messages forwarded from your old account for 30 days.
This new feature is available in all newly-created Gmail accounts, and it will be available to all existing accounts. It’ll take longer than the few hours or days that most Gmail features take to get out to everyone.
According to Gmail all of you can still use POP3 mail fetching and upload your contacts in a CSV file, but this new way is much simpler for basic imports. And you can access and move your data the way you want — it’s been easy to auto-forward all your Gmail messages to any other service, and now it’s a little easier vice versa.
Google’s new stand-alone contacts manager
May 5th
Today I came across a post, with very attractive and catchy topic “Google launches stand-alone contacts manager.” This post is all about Google’s new stand-alone contacts manager. According to CNET news Google has launched a contacts manager that users of services like Google Docs, Picasa, and Calendar can use, without having to be a Gmail users.
The major aim of this contacts manager is to let the users share contacts more easily between different services. Google Contacts is just similar like any other contacts function. You can easily import and export your contacts from other sources such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo, or Hotmail. For Apple you must use a utility called "A to G."
If you are part of a business, school or other organization using Google Apps, the administrator will have to enable this functionality within the control panel by clicking on the "add more services" link, finding the "Contacts" option and clicking the "add it now" button.
After reading about this feature it looks cool, but thing is where will other contact services go? I didn’t see anything really innovative.
You can have Google Contacts here.
Insert images into your Gmail messages
Apr 10th
Gmail is a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that email can be more intuitive, efficient, and useful.. Gmail Labs is a way for us to take lots of the ideas we wouldn’t normally pick and let you all (who use Gmail) decide whether they’re good or not. Gmail may be used by millions of people every day.
Now you no longer have to use workarounds to put images into your messages or attach images when you really want to inline them. Just turn on "Inserting images" from the Labs tab under Settings, and you’ll see a new toolbar icon like this:
Make sure you’re in rich formatting mode, or it won’t show up. Click the little image icon, and you can insert images in two ways: 1. By uploading image files from your computer or 2. By providing image URLs.
Keep in mind that Gmail doesn’t show URL-based images in messages by default to protect you from spammers, so if you’re sending mail to other Gmail users, they’ll still have to click "Display images below" or "Always display images from …" to see images you embed.
Gmail search made more easier
Apr 3rd
Gmail is a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that email can be more intuitive, efficient, and useful.
Now there is always a question of finding the right email among thousands, which is as important as finding the right web page across the billions of web pages.
Gmail has made the search more easier, Gmail labs is introducing a new experimental feature in Gmail Labs: Search Autocomplete.
Turn on Search Autocomplete from the Labs tab under Gmail Settings, and you’ll get suggestions as you type in the search box. One of the most popular searches in Gmail is for names or email addresses, so the first kind of suggestions you’ll see are contacts. Some names are not easy to remember — with this new Labs feature you can just type one or two letters and select the desired contact from the drop down list.
Gmail also offers advanced search operators, which provide a powerful way to find that one message you want to search. You can search in specific places (e.g. in chats or sent items), or search for messages with attachments of a certain type (e.g. docs or photos).
With Search Autocomplete, you can just type “photos” or “pictures,” select “has photos” from the drop down list, and the search query (filename:(jpg OR png)) gets inserted for me.
Similarly, you can type in the word “attachment” and Search Autocomplete will list the most common attachment types for you.
If you’d like to include tiff files in your search result, you can adapt the query manually to filename:(jpg OR png OR tiff).
Gmail to get multilingual translation
Mar 30th
Google announced it is going global with its Gmail Labs box of quirky functions it launched last year in English.
Features include undo send, a way of retracting an e-mail up to five seconds after you hit the send button; mail goggles,which makes you solve some math questions before sending a message, to make it harder to send messages while inebriated; and a forgotten attachment reminder, which reminds you to attach a file if you mention one in your message. The other labs features are YouTube Previews in Gmail, Preview Pictures in Gmail, Yelp Previews In Gmail.
Eric Tholome, director of product management at Google said:
“Because Gmail lives on the Internet, in what we call the ‘cloud’, we’re able to innovate quickly and offer users creative, new and useful features on a regular basis,”
Gmail Lab’s new languages are Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Oriya, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
Google hasn’t made it official, but PC World News Service and the Google Operating System blog are totally convinced that Gmail will get multi-language, on-the-fly translation of their email messages at an event in Brussels today to celebrate Gmail’s fifth birthday.
