Webware

Even with the most practiced digits, composing long e-mail on the iPhone's virtual keyboard is the slow, awkward pits compared with typing on a desktop keyboard. However, Google released a small new feature on Monday just for long-winded iPhone e-mail authors that makes typing lengthy Gmail messages easier on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Before, the composition box was fixed. Starting today, verbose e-mailers will see blank lines appear below the cursor as you reach the bottom of the window. If there's a limit to how many lines you can add in a Gmail message, we haven't found it yet. We went crazy with the carriage return and created an estimated extra 100 lines for text without trouble. To review your message, just swipe up and down to scroll.

At this point, Gmail's composition window won't contract when you delete lines; expansion alone is the name of the game.

The expanding Gmail composition box is part of Google's iterative Web project for slowly introducing new features to Gmail mobile one at a time. The composition feature is available to iPhone and iPod users who reach Gmail via Gmail.com from the Safari browser.

Google's Gmail-for-mobile project began in April 2009.

ORLANDO, Fla.--Watch out, business technology managers, because Google has its eyes on your domain.

If Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt gets his way, the line that separates the computing services used by businesses from those used by consumers will fade fast. And Google, through services such as Google Apps and the new Google Wave, hopes to accelerate the change.

CNET News Poll

When should your company switch to Gmail?
Gmail is the main appeal to Google Apps subscriptions today. How soon would you like to see it at your company?

Now. I want search and Web access.
2010 for a graceful transition.
2014, when it stops crashing.
When hell freezes over.

View results

The company has done well so far with services that appeal chiefly to consumers, but Schmidt said at the Gartner Symposium here that Google likes services that become part people's lives regardless of whether they are doing work. And because the company covers its costs by charging enterprise accounts $50 per person per year for those services at work, he said it's just a matter of attaining scale before the business becomes "very profitable" for Google.

I spoke to Schmidt after a Gartner Symposium talk in which he said the enterprise market is Google's next billion-dollar revenue opportunity. Here's an edited transcript of the interview.

... Read more

Gmail's labs section is full of tools that help advanced users fine-tune the interface of the free Web mail service. What may be more impressive, though, are its tweaks for the not-so-advanced users, the kind who need a little hand-holding to keep them from firing off e-mails while intoxicated, or missives that they didn't mean to send in the first place.

To add to these two features, Google on Tuesday introduced "got the wrong Bob?", a very simple tweak that, based on first names, will give you a subtle nudge if it thinks you're sending an e-mail to someone outside of the group you usually correspond with. The alert shows up just above the subject line and asks "Did you mean: ____ instead of ____?" Clicking that link replaces the wrong e-mail address immediately.

In my testing I got it to work pretty well on family and co-workers, although it misfired a few times on groups of friends with whom I had past group e-mailing history. Obviously the more you send to certain people, the better it should get at identifying the ones who don't fit. However, I think most people aren't bound to get into this kind of trouble with Gmail's contact auto-complete suggestions which are quite good. It shows you the person's full name, and their e-mail address, making it difficult to accidentally select the wrong person. Then again, if you're in a rush, mistakes can most definitely happen.

One thing about e-mail, no matter how much more convenient it is over opening a letter and reading a piece of paper, we always want to make it easier. Here's a trick for making a shortcut to your unread e-mail in Gmail in Firefox.

Gmail makes it easy to bookmark different parts of itself. For instance: you can book mark your in-box at mail.google.com/mail/#inbox. That keyword after the pound sign is the key. Change that to #sent and you can book mark your sent e-mail.

Unread mail doesn't have a nifty keyword like that. Instead, you need to do a search within Gmail. Go into the search box in Gmail and type: is:unread in:inbox. Once you get the search results, which should be your unread mail, bookmark the rather ugly but useful URL. The easiest way would be to drag it right to the toolbar.

Now that seems simple, so let's make it more complicated so that it is easier to use later. You won't want to hunt around for that bookmark, right?

So, do this: right-click on the bookmark you just created and select properties.

In the keyword field, type a name you'll easily remember like GU.

Next, open a new tab. Type GU in the address bar and press enter.

Boom! You're taken directly to your unread e-mail. Nifty.

Hotmail users aren't the only ones who've been hit by a phishing scheme over the past week. Google told BBC News on Tuesday that Gmail users have also been affected by the hackers who posted passwords online.

The problem is far more widespread than was disclosed on Monday, possibly affecting Yahoo and AOL e-mail accounts as well, according to BBC News.

Google described the issue as an "industrywide phishing scheme." BBC News said it has seen two lists posted online with "more than 30,000 names and passwords" from Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail, and other service providers.

"We recently became aware of an industrywide phishing scheme through which hackers gained user credentials for Web-based mail accounts including Gmail accounts," a Google representative told me in an e-mail.

The representative said that Google immediately "forced passwords resets on the affected accounts."

In an e-mail to CNET, a Google representative said that the company had to reset the passwords on fewer than 500 Gmail accounts so far. However, that figure could change.

Despite Google's and Microsoft's awareness of the problem, it doesn't seem that users are out of the woods just yet. Google's representative told CNET that it will continue to force password resets on any newly affected user accounts.

Like Microsoft, Google was quick to point out to the BBC that the phishing scheme was a "scam to get users to give away their personal information to hackers" and not an internal security issue. It didn't say how users fell victim to the scheme.

Google's admission that Gmail users were affected by the phishing scheme comes on the heels of Microsoft acknowledging that over 10,000 Live Hotmail accounts were compromised by the scam. The passwords apparently first hit the Internet on October 1.

Updated at 9:10 a.m. PDT to include Google's comments.

Gmail was unavailable Thursday morning for what Google said was a "small subset of users," the latest outage from a company that prides itself in running advanced computing systems.

On the Google Apps status dashboard, the company said at 7:29 a.m. PDT that it was aware of the problem. However, using IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) to access e-mail through software such as Outlook or Thunderbird still works, the company said.

Even a small subset can be a lot of people, though, as carping on Twitter indicates.

Gmail outages hit Google itself sometimes, providing extra incentive to improve reliability. One company spokesman, Adam Kovacevich, said on Twitter, "Gmail down (for Googlers too)."

Google had Gmail outages in February, April, and very widely on September 1.

Gmail was working for me Thursday morning, but slowly and without access to my contacts at 8 a.m. PDT. By 8:13 a.m., it was behaving properly.

Updated 9:15 a.m. PDT - Many users are reporting that their e-mail is back to normal, but there are still problems with Gmail contacts. Google posted the following advisory at 8:29 a.m. PDT.

"The Gmail issue should now be resolved for most of our users. There still might be issues with your contacts. For Gmail users: Use www.google.com/contacts to access your contacts For Google Apps Customers: www.google.com/contacts/a/yourdomain-name.com."

Updated 9:54 a.m. PDT - Google asked for more time before it feels ready to declare an all-clear. "We are continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by September 24, 2009 10:30:00 AM UTC-7 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem."

Updated 10:10 a.m. PDT - It's now safe to return to your computer, according to Google. "The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support."

Tom Krazit contributed to this report.

Mozilla released a major update Tuesday to the beta build of its desktop e-mail client Thunderbird, debuting a new search feature, "smart" folders, an activity manager for monitoring communication with your mail server, and better Gmail integration among the list of improvements. Thunderbird 3 beta 4 is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The smart folder view condenses your various in-boxes into one gestalt in-box, but it's easy to switch back to the traditional view if you don't like it. In the folders pane, use the left and right arrows at the top right to change your folder view until you're looking at the one you prefer. Thunderbird will remember your last setting, so when you restart it won't jump back to the smart folder setting. If you have multiple e-mail accounts, though, this should make managing your e-mail stream much easier.

Apparently, there was a lot of code that was overhauled in this fourth beta and that might explain why my default button bar and toolbar settings reverted to normal. It might also have been because of the introduction of the new search bar, which defaults to a significant chunk of window space. The global search bar features auto-complete as well as more robust filtering tools for narrowing down a broad search quickly.

I found the new search to work well, opening the results in a new tab, although occasionally narrowing down results did not produce the desired result of fewer e-mails in the results window. Searching by tags also appeared spotty at times. Searches do produce a nifty chart, accessible by clicking on the blue bar graph at the top of the search results, that's good for numbers junkies who want to see how often that particular search term shows up.

Windows users should also find that Thunderbird results will now appear when search in Windows Vista and Windows 7, while Mac users will find Growl notification support for new e-mails, integration with the Mac OS X address book, and support for Mail.app. Beta 4 doesn't support legacy versions of Windows prior to Windows 2000 or Mac OS X 10.3 and older.

Thunderbird 3 beta 4 supports the nightly builds of the calendaring plug-in Lightning, but many other add-ons are likely to break until their publishers release compatibility updates. The full list of Thunder 3 beta 4 changes can be read here.

Google is clearly proud of its environmental ethos and likes to show it off through its products, but there can be too much of a good thing.

Mostly in an attempt to gross people out, I tried adding the new Turf theme for Gmail while using the Grass theme for Chrome (download Google Chrome).

Nobody ever accused me of having much in the way of taste, but even I can tell it's pretty awful. The eyestrain alone is headache-inducing.

What's the worst combination you can think of? High Score on Legal Pad? And what happens when you add in operating system themes?

Google's nearly two-hour Gmail outage Tuesday was the result of a miscalculation regarding the capacity of its system, the company said late Tuesday.

Gmail was down from about 12:30 p.m. PDT Tuesday to about 2:30 p.m. PDT, affecting millions of Gmail customers who depend on the service for everything from fantasy football roster updates to business-critical information. The problem was caused by a classic cascade in which servers became overwhelmed with traffic in rapid succession.

According to Google, the problem began when it took several Gmail servers offline for maintenance, a routine procedure that normally is transparent to users. However, the twist this time around was that Google had made some changes to the routers that direct Gmail traffic to servers in hopes of improving reliability, and those changes backfired.

"As we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers--servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response," Google said in a post to its Gmail blog late Tuesday.

"At about 12:30 p.m. Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system 'stop sending us traffic, we're too slow!' This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded," wrote Ben Treynor, vice president of engineering and site reliability czar.

Google fixed the problem by allocating traffic across the rest of its prodigious network, a luxury that it enjoys given the resources it has put in place to operate the world's leading search engine. But what's next?

Google said it would focus on making sure that the request routers have sufficient headroom to handle future spikes in demand, as well as figuring out a way to make sure that problems in one sector can be isolated without bringing down the entire service. "We'll be hard at work over the next few weeks implementing these and other Gmail reliability improvements--remains more than 99.9% available to all users, and we're committed to keeping events like today's notable for their rarity," Treynor wrote.

Several Google Apps customers who use Gmail for internal e-mail at their businesses and organizations did not return calls Tuesday seeking information on the degree to which they were affected, making it difficult to know the magnitude of the failure. However, Google has put an awful lot of time and money this year behind promoting Gmail as a back-end e-mail software alternative to products from Microsoft and IBM, and embarrassments like this will not help it sell the service to other organizations.

"We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there's a problem with the service," Treynor wrote. "Thus, right up front, I'd like to apologize to all of you--today's outage was a Big Deal, and we're treating it as such."