Yes, Gmail was down today, September 1, 2009 for a stretch this afternoon. Really it wasn’t more than about two hours at the most from what I saw and from what I hear IMAP/SMTP access was working although the web interface was down. I found out a few interesting things during the outage though. …
Tag: gmail
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Great tip for Dealing with SPAM email
In reading over at the Gmail Blog, I came across this suggestion to try with Gmail. The idea is, let’s say your address is johndoe@gmail.com Okay, next time you sign up for a mailing list, or need a free website login, use johndoe+freelogin@gmail.com or johndoe+spam@gmail.com or any other unique identifier (something you’ll be able to track.) The idea is this… gmail ignores anything after a + in the address and the mail will still get to your inbox, but… here comes the cool part.
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Watch what things you store in public places…. part 342
Not too long ago there was an article about how people reveal too much about their lives in Google (or other web) calendars AND MAKE PUBLIC…. well I think this takes it a step further. Gmail let’s you access your mail through an RSS feed…. well there are online services that let you subscribe/watch feeds and apparently the feeds are put in the public access folder…. (oooops.) Be careful what you make public….
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Google Calendar revisited
When Google Calendar first rolled out, I took a look and was not overwhelmed. Now, I’ve had a chance to revisit and see a few improvements. First, one of my initial problems was that I couldn’t get to calendar from gmail. The code has now been added in the upper left corner to navigate between the two (or the google homepage, or their “other services”). This was missing when I first looked. I distinctly remember seeing it in one of the testing screenshots. Even immediately after I had started out with the Calendar, the link was still not there. I’m not sure when, but it’s there now. Good.
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Time to start cleaning out sites – the internet’s getting too full….
Or at least Google may be…. stories here and here. The way the Register puts it is that Google is in an arms race with blog spammers, with tools out that can create 100 blogs in 24 minutes and shops that can provide mass numbers of private label articles, they contend that google is drowning in the spam so to speak. I can’t help but connect it (as they do) with the changes related to the Big Daddy update which really seemed to mark a drastic change in search rangings for some of the pages on this site. Search terms that had for a time done quite well for me (page 1) dropped an average of 3-4 pages almost overnight (literally over two nights).
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Google Calendar escapes into public use..
There have been rumors for (years?) a long time at least, that google was preparing something known as cl2 which would be a calendar with full gmail integration. There were screenshots, many of which were photoshopped from another web calendar, but there were others that were more convincing… well, as of late yesterday Google Calendar has escaped in to public view. http://www.google.com/calendar. I first tried logging in through my gmail account thinking I might see info there, but I didn’t, so I went to the above link and answered a question about what time zone I’m in, then got to see the main interface.
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Google Talk federation….
When Google Talk first came out, many people were excited that they were using the protocol that jabber is built on. There were also disappointments that ALL of the protocol hadn’t been implemented. In fact, the biggest disappointment many had was that a jabber.org instant messenger user could not IM with a gmail.com user. That has all changed…. Google Talk now does “open federation” which basically means IM requests can be passed along from one server to another until it get’s to the server that the IM user is registered with.
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GMail vulnerability on Atom feed?
I don’t know about this, and will be curious to see what the answer is…. barrapunto.com had the link to a post from a Gmail user who notes… Gmail has the capability to have a feed of your new messages in Atom format. (We’re talking rss feeds here.) That’s all well and good. He went to bloglines though and tried to setup viewing of his feed…. and saw tons of email – NOT HIS.
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Gmail Virus scanning and more
I saw a link yesterday about Gmail adding virus scanning to their featureset. It’s very good to see, they have very good junk filtering at this point and had a blanket policy that .exe’s were banned (which would stop a good percentage of the bugs.) Anyway, it’s good to see this is added. (I wouldn’t mind if there were a config switch to opt out, to help send samples to virustotal or wherever, but there are other ways to do that so it’s not a big deal and probably better that it’s not optionally disabled.) Article (brief) here.
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Windows Live Mail (Next generation Hotmail) get’s an update
Looks like Windows Live Mail Beta has seen an update, this beta program is open to those that request to partake from what I see and is Microsoft’s next generation replacement for Hotmail. It looks like it will be quite well Ajax-ified and some interesting features for classifying mail by senders (known/unknown/unsafe) is interesting.