gmail

The first application I open and the last one I close each workday is Gmail.

Even though I use the service's labels and filters to sort my mail, I often found myself scrolling through the 600-plus messages in my Gmail in-box to find the one I need.

Then I discovered Gmail's search operators, and my scrolling days were over.

For instance, when I need to find the message from Ellen with the agenda attached, I type from:ellen filename:doc. If I need to find the message I sent my brother Larry about the NCAA basketball tournament pool … Read more

Google plans to launch a service called App Engine Monday evening that the company hopes will attract programmers and eventually companies needing an expandable foundation for online applications.

App Engine, free to the first 10,000 people who sign up, offers a combination of several online Google services for those who want a place to host software, said Pete Koomen, a product manager on the Google developer team. Those include the BigTable service for data storage and processing--as expected--along with authentication to let people sign on to services and e-mail to let the system handle communications, he said.

At … Read more

Happy April Fools' Day!

As expected, Google's Gmail rolled out a fake "custom time" feature, which purports to let users send e-mails into the past and consequently never miss important deadlines again. The new feature "utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality," Google wrote.

"I just got two tickets to Radiohead by being the 'first' to respond to a co-worker's 'first-come, first-serve' email," a fake testimonial on the Custom Time site read. "Someone else had already won them, but I told everyone to check their inboxes again. Everyone sort … Read more

UPDATE 4:10 a.m. PDT April 1: It's up! Check out Gmail custom time to see how Google uses an "e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality."

It looks like we are getting a preview of Google's April Fools' joke for Gmail a little early. Google put the link in the screenshot above on everyone's Gmail page. As of right now, the link only takes you to a 404 error screen, but presumably Google will post its joke in the near future.

It seems strange that Google would push a dead link to all … Read more

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