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.
Update October 6 at 11:25 a.m.: This was later discovered to be an industrywide problem that has affected users of Gmail and possibly other e-mail services as well. See more details here.
Thousands of Windows Live Hotmail passwords have been leaked online, Microsoft has confirmed. The news was first reported by Neowin.
According to Microsoft, it "learned that several thousand Windows Live Hotmail customers' credentials were exposed on a third-party site" at some point over the weekend. Neowin originally reported that the credentials were posted to a developer forum on Pastebin.com on October 1.
After learning of the breach, Microsoft "immediately requested that the credentials be removed and launched an investigation to determine the impact to customers," it wrote on its Windows Live blog.
The company was quick to point out that credentials were stolen through what was "likely a phishing scheme." The company said that it "was not a breach of internal Microsoft data." It's currently "working to help customers regain control of their accounts."
Microsoft did not immediately respond to CNET's request for comment.
Microsoft didn't say exactly how many accounts were affected, but Neowin reported that the original list displayed accounts with names starting with "A" and "B."
Twitter and other social networks are abuzz with people advising others to change their passwords. Microsoft wrote in the blog post that those who believe they were affected by the phishing scheme should immediately do just that.
Updated at 1:30 p.m. PDT to include Microsoft's confirmation of the breach.
Yahoo is still king of the e-mail market as of June 2009, but Gmail has the most momentum.
(Credit: ComScore Media Metrix)Google's Gmail is the fastest-growing e-mail service on the planet, but it has a way to go to catch Yahoo's still-growing market share.
ComScore's latest figures for the e-mail market show Yahoo added almost 20 million users last year, growing its share of the market by 22 percent from 87.2 million users to 106.2 million users in June. Only Gmail grew faster--a 46-percent clip--but just 36.9 million people are currently using Gmail. Microsoft's Hotmail is the second-most widely used e-mail with 47.1 million users, up 3 percent from last year.
Some outlets, such as TechCrunch, zeroed in on Google's performance, noting that it has now surpassed Web 1.0 stalwart AOL's steadily falling share of the e-mail market. Others, such as Daring Fireball, noted that Google has better mindshare among the digerati than Yahoo or Hotmail.
But Yahoo, currently rebranding itself around content and services after dumping its search business on Microsoft, should be thrilled at 22 percent growth starting from such a large number. Now that Yahoo will be dependent on attracting eyeballs to its vast network of Web content, pushing that content to those logging into Yahoo to check their e-mail becomes extremely important.
Google has had to make some changes as Gmail has grown larger, tweaking the "labels" sorting structure it uses inside Gmail to behave more like the traditional folder-based organization used by other e-mail services. Still, there's no doubt that Gmail has breathed new life into the original killer application for the Internet since it made its debut five years ago, and Yahoo Mail will have to make sure to stay on top of evolving usage patterns to maintain its edge.
Microsoft has updated its Hotmail Web e-mail service with more Bing search integration. Hotmail's quick add menu, which was introduced to a limited number of users earlier this year, lets users do a quick Web searches for things like maps, movie times, restaurants, images, and videos. Previously this used Windows Live search, but starting today it's grabbing results from Bing.
Just as it worked before, search results stream in on the right inside of the window, and can be inserted inside of outgoing messages or replies. Maps and videos can be quickly resized, and in the case of videos--previewed before being inserted.
The quick add menu now takes advantage of search results from Bing.com, Microsoft's Web search tool.
(Credit: CNET)The one limiting factor that remains with the transition is that if you want more than the few results that show up in the quick add menu, you have to retrieve them outside of Hotmail and on Bing.com. And once you're on there, the buttons to simply add the content to an outgoing message do not come along for the ride.
You also are still unable to minimize the quick add menu when it's not in use. Many users have created special browser extensions and CSS hacks to get rid of it, since despite its utility, it still takes up 200 or so pixels on the right of the screen that you cannot get back.
Quick add is not available in all localizations. Microsoft says only users in Australia, Canada, China, India, the U.S., and the U.K. will see the updated tool in their in-boxes.
E-mails sent to a non-Hotmail address have been copied to a folder within a Hotmail account in Windows Live Mail.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)I blogged about Gmail's new feature that helps you migrate from other Web-based e-mail services to Gmail and I have received a lot of e-mails asking if there's a way to back up an offline POP3 e-mail archive to an online e-mail service.
The answer is yes, but depending on what e-mail clients you use, it can require a fair amount of work. If you're using Outlook Express, for example, it's fairly easy. If you use Thunderbird, however, there will be a few extra steps.
The Thunderbird <-> Outlook Express archive convert tool.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)First, you will need a Hotmail account, if you don't yet have one; it's free to sign up. After that, download and use Windows Live Mail to connect with the Hotmail account. This process is pretty straightforward.
Windows Live Mail synchronizes with your Hotmail account, which means all the e-mails you have downloaded to your computer will remain on the Hotmail server and be available for you to view using a Web browser.
Apart from Hotmail.com and Live.com e-mail accounts, Windows Live Mail can also handle other types of accounts, including POP3. When you have multiple e-mail accounts with Windows Live Mail, each account will have a separate set of "Inbox," "Sent Items," "Drafts," and so on, as well as other user-created folders.
If you want to upload an existing Outlook Express e-mail archive to your Hotmail account, first run Windows Live Mail and import your Outlook Express messages. (To do this, press Alt-F then choose "Import" on the menu). Once the import process is done, create a new folder within your Hotmail account and name it, say, "POP3 backup." You can create different folders for different groups of e-mails. After that, you can drag and drop or copy messages from the POP3 import into these new folders.
Now all you need to do is sync the Hotmail account and voila! You will see those added folders and e-mails you've just imported on the Hotmail server. This means you can access them wherever you are via a browser and they are saved in Hotmail server.
The sync process can take a long time if you have a big POP3 archive (and a slow connection), and, of course, you can't sync any archive larger than the space allowed by Hotmail, which is 5GB.
If you use Outlook, you can first use Outlook Express to import Outlook's archive before doing the process. Basically, you can use Outlook Express as the intermediary for the import process.
An e-mail sent to a non-Hotmail account has been backed up to the Hotmail server and can be viewed by a Web browser.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)For ThunderBird users, you can use the eml2mbox function of this free conversion tool called IMAPSize to convert Thunderbird's e-mail archive into Outlook Express' format.
Of course, once you have those e-mails in a Hotmail account, you can always import them into Gmail by using the new migration tool. It's good to keep data at multiple places anyway.
So make this your weekend project and back up those precious messages.
Microsoft's Hotmail site now lets people send and receive instant messages.
(Credit: Microsoft)Following the lead of Yahoo and Google, Microsoft has begun adding the ability to hold instant-messaging conversations to its Web site.
The company already has added the feature for users in France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the U.K., and has begun gradually adding to user accounts in Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United States, the company said in a blog post Monday.
The feature is available through Hotmail and also through the people page that lists a Windows Live user's contacts.
I prefer instant-messaging software that runs natively on my PC, chiefly because of its faster, easier interface. But Web-based IM can be useful for the same reasons as Web-based e-mail: you can use it from any machine, including your friend's, that one at the airport kiosk or cybercafe, the locked-down machine at work, or your brand-new system that you haven't configured yet but need to use immediately. Also, if you're the type to store your IM chats, it's nicer to store them centrally in the cloud.
Now if only Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Google would get together so I don't have multiple, incompatible instant-messaging networks, then I'd be even happier.
Via LiveSide.net
The chat window shows as a separate browser window.
(Credit: Microsoft)It's not easy running an online e-mail service with hundreds of millions of users.
Later on the same day that Yahoo Mail wasn't available to a small fraction of its users, Hotmail had troubles with disappearing in-boxes. Here's the company statement:
"On Thursday evening, there was a short-term service disruption which prevented Windows Live Hotmail customers worldwide from accessing their in-box for approximately two hours. Microsoft worked quickly to restore access. No data was lost during the outage. Microsoft apologizes for any inconvenience this may have caused." The company didn't share details about how many people were affected.
E-mail is central to the lives of a growing number of people, but nobody's perfect when it comes to offering the service. Comcast had an e-mail outage on Saturday, and Google's Gmail went down in February.
Correction at 7:55 a.m. PST: Googlesystem is not an official Google blog.
Google has inked a deal with online account migration tool provider TrueSwitch in an attempt to streamline the process of moving to Gmail from competing e-mail services, according to Googlesystem, a third-party blog that tracks the search giant's efforts.
Gmail has previously offered tools that let people import contacts and messages from other e-mail services, but the company apparently believed it was making it too hard on new users to import data and wanted to find a way to make account migration more straightforward.
According to the Googlesystem blog, people can use the TrueSwitch migration tool to bring in all their data from AOL Mail, Yahoo Mail, MSN's Hotmail, and other services.
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The TrueSwitch migration feature is being added to Gmail's Settings menu. After inputting the e-mail address of the account they would like to import, users will be asked to enter that account's password and decide what they want imported. They will also be able to label the imported messages to distinguish e-mails sent to the old account and those sent to their new Gmail account. It will take 24 hours to 48 hours before the messages appear in Gmail.
Using TrueSwitch could significantly lower the barriers to switching to Gmail. Some Yahoo Mail and Hotmail users are loath to switch to Gmail and lose their data, so they instead decide to stay put.
The TrueSwitch import tool apparently is being rolled out over the next few days, though it's not clear when it will be available to all users.
Google has added a patch to its latest beta version and stable version of Chrome to make the browser work better with Microsoft's Hotmail site.
With the patch, Chrome tells Microsoft's site it's actually Apple's Safari browser, sidestepping a compatibility issue that had caused problems using the site.
"While the Hotmail team works on a proper fix, we're deploying a workaround that changes the user agent string that Google Chrome sends when requesting URLs that end with mail.live.com," Chrome Product Manager Mark Larson said in a blog announcement. It also fixes a problem sending mail from Yahoo Mail, he said.
The patch is in Chrome 1.0.154.46, which also fixes a severe security problem.
Matt Cutts, Google's chief Web spam fighter and a high-profile company blogger, was less delicate about the Hotmail issue. "Normally you think of Web pages being faster to update than client-side software downloads. In this case though, Chrome updates near-weekly, much faster than Hotmail did. Another illustration that velocity and speed of iteration matter," he said in an online comment about the matter.
To which Omar Shahine, evidently involved with the Microsoft service, had a rebuttal: "That's a rather naive statement. You think that Hotmail is a Web page and you expect a service with hundreds of millions of users and thousands of servers to stop what it's doing, fix a bug for a browser that the majority of its customers do not use, and spin up an out-of-band release? We've already committed to addressing this issue in our next service release (already started to roll out to the site) which IMHO is an acceptable reaction."
Cutts responded, in effect, that Google knows plenty about running big Web sites, thank you very much. "Google runs Web services with many users and servers too and we launch changes weekly or faster," he said.
(Via Google Blogoscoped)
As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time wading through e-mails, finding the best e-mail service is paramount in my life.
Realizing that, I've done my fair share of shuffling from one e-mail program to the next--trying to find the best service that not only offers speed and stability, but also reliability and spam control. And although e-mail services are getting better, it's abundantly clear that few offer the kind of experience I'm really looking for in an e-mail client. But Google's Gmail app is different. It's better than its competition on a number of levels and provides the kind of e-mail experience that's simply unrivaled online.
Spam, Spam, Spam
I've used practically every e-mail service on the Web and I can say, without a doubt, that Gmail blocks the most spam. To those who open a new account, spam may not be a serious concern. Your spam folder will likely remain empty for a while until your new e-mail address makes its way into the wild. But for my e-mail address, which is widely available and easily attainable, spam is a constant headache.
On services like Yahoo Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, and AOL Mail, the spam blocker tried but failed on too many occasions. In fact, dealing with spam in my already bloated in-box was a daily occurrence that got worse as more messages piled up. But Gmail is different. Right now, I have thousands of messages sitting in my spam folder that never made their way to my in-box. Even better, I can say with all honesty that I only see about two or three spam messages per day in my in-box--not perfect, but much better than anything the competition is offering.
Google Apps
Maybe it's not fair to compare e-mail clients on the basis of additional apps, but I'll do it anyway. After all, Google is competing with the likes of Yahoo and AOL--two major Web companies--and I don't see why these two can't release apps that provide an even greater value proposition to users.
There's something so appealing about receiving an e-mail from someone who attached a Word document or Excel spreadsheet and being given the option to open that attachment in Google Docs. And being able to switch to Google Calendar and Reader from Gmail cuts down on time spent on managing my day. Maybe that functionality appeals to me because I prefer using apps like Google Calendar and Reader to keep me organized and "in the know", but I honestly can't see myself using another e-mail client knowing how invested I am in other Google apps. Suffice to say that my affinity for Gmail stretches beyond e-mail.
Filters
Gmail's filter feature is the best in the business. Period. Unlike its competitors, which try to provide a filter tool that simply re-routes incoming messages, Gmail delivers a power user's dream. In a matter of seconds, you can create a filter that searches through all incoming mail looking for specific people or keywords and once found, immediately categorizes it into a specific folder, forwards it on to someone else, or moves it to the trash, to name just a few functions.
With the help of Filters, using Gmail becomes an even more rewarding experience. Gone are the days of spending big chunks of your time attempting to find just one e-mail that's lost in a collection of thousands. Other e-mail services try desperately to provide the same kind of filter features, but they fall flat. In my experience, messages are either missed, the filter has performs the wrong function, or simply not ends up not working. In fact, Yahoo Mail's filter feature works only in its Classic e-mail app and according to the company, won't be available in the new interface until it's done "tweaking the Yahoo! Mail Filters option." Yikes.
Annoying ads
Anyone who has used Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, or Windows Live Hotmail knows all too well that the annoying ads are in abundance. But when you load up Gmail, it's an entirely different story.
Sure, there are ads on Gmail, but unlike the other services, they're not intrusive in any way. I never notice them when I'm working with the program, but when I load up Yahoo Mail or try out Hotmail, I'm inundated with ugly display ads that reduce the service's screen real estate and generally take away from the experience. Granted, ads don't have any impact on the viability of an e-mail service, but doesn't it stand to reason that if you're not forced to look at blinking ads while working in your e-mail, you'll be a happier user?
I certainly think so.
Conversation Displays
I realize there are many people out there who enjoy the "classic" style of displaying e-mails based on their arrival, but I'm not one of them. I like that Gmail groups an entire e-mail conversation into one and forgoes the use of individual strands. The latter strikes me as outdated and useless today in a world of constant e-mail communication.
That said, I realize my opinion isn't the most popular. Yahoo and AOL Mail are more popular than Gmail and each employs the "old" display style, suggesting that users prefer that over Gmail's style. But I think that's more of a reaction to what users know than to what they would like. In fact, I'm willing to bet that if those people were forced to use Gmail for a week, the vast majority would dump Yahoo or AOL in favor of Google's client as soon as a flurry of e-mails between two parties broke out and they needed to go back to find a particular message. Finding that message couldn't be easier in Gmail.
