Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) software engineer Elvin Lee announced today that the company has dropped the price of 20GB storage between GMail and Picasa to $5 per year. Google currently gives 7.27GB of free storage for GMail and 1GB of free storage for Picasa. Before Google was offering 10GB of storage for $20 per year. For $20 per year now you can buy 80GB worth of storage. I’m highly considering the 80GB option because I have 27GB worth of photos and do not like the way that Facebook decreases the resolution quality when hosting my photos. To add more storage to your account, visit https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage.
Yesterday Google e-mail service GMail.com went offline for a period of 100 minutes. For a while there, no one knew why this happened but Google recently revealed the cause.
The GMail team took a small number of the GMail servers offline in order to perform routine upgrades. However the company underestimated the load that recent changes in the service would place on the request servers. The request servers became overloaded and told the system to stop sending traffic. The load was then transferred to other remaining request routers which caused more servers to become overloaded. Within a few minutes all of the request routers were overloaded causing a massive outage. While mobile users still had luck in retrieving their e-mails, GMail on the web could not see their e-mail because requests could not be sent. IMAP/POP access still worked because they use different routers.
To alleviate this from happening again, the GMail team increased router capacity well beyond the normal peak demand in order to buffer any data loads. Ben Treynor, the VP Engineering and Site Reliability Czar at Google wrote “Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users, and we’re committed to keeping events like today’s notable for their rarity.”
Up until recently there was no way to receive push notifications for e-mail through GMail on the iPhone. However an application called GPush has been added to the iTunes App Store earlier this month.
Push notifications are one of the biggest advantages that BlackBerry mobile phones had over the iPhone before the iPhone OS 3.0 was released. The application does not open or send e-mails, it literally only sends push notifications. GPush was developed by Tiverias Apps.
GPush is easy to set up. All you have to do is submit your user name and password. After entering the information, you just have to agree to let the app send you push notifications. The application still has several bugs, but it still works pretty well.
GMail is one of the most used e-mail systems across the globe. Given that there are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world, being able to understand each other’s communication is very important. Hence Google’s integration of the Translate service into GMail.
In the Google Labs tab in GMail, there is a feature called Message Translation. If you receive an e-mail in another language with this feature enabled there will be an option where it says “translate message to:” or an option to “change language.”
Amit Chowdhry | March 22, 2009 | 615 views | Comments Categorized under GMail, Google
Oops, you accidentally sent a nasty e-mail to an ex- that you didn’t mean and you want to take it back. Good news if you are using GMail and run into this type of problem. If you send an e-mail that you immediately regret, GMail will allow you to unsend it. Here’s how it works:
Click on Settings and go to GMail Labs. Enable “Undo Send” by Yuzo F and Save the Settings. After that is enabled, when you send out messages, you will notice the Undo button by the confirmation message.
If you click Undo, GMail will take back the message and return you to the compose part of the message. The message is held for only about 5 seconds so you have to react quickly if you regret sending the e-mail.
Amit Chowdhry | February 11, 2009 | 266 views | Comments Categorized under GMail, Google
New in the GMail Labs is a signature feature that will report where you are currently located. This was part of a 20% project for Marco Bonechi, Software Engineer for GMail. One of the questions he has received often is “where are you?” since he travels around quite a bit. This new feature will include a line below that says “Sent from: [city name, state, country].
To activate the feature, click on Labs within the Settings Tab and activate “Location in Signature.” Then go into your signature preferences and click on “Append your location to the signature.” The signature will use your IP address to figure out where you are located so it may not be correct everytime. For example, my IP address reports me as being in Southfield, MI instead of Ann Arbor, MI since that is where my ISP is based.
However if you want to make your location more accurate, there is a version that supports the locations module within Google Gears. Gears will report where you are located based on the wi-fi access point. In every e-mail you write, you can delete the line that reports the location.
Amit Chowdhry | February 6, 2009 | 473 views | Comments Categorized under GMail, Google
Octavian “Vivi” Costache, Software Engineer for GMail used his 20% personal project time to create a new feature in GMail Labs that allows separate panes within GMail for filtered mail. This can include starred e-mail or specific labeled e-mails. This new feature is called Multiple Inboxes in the Labs section.
To activate the feature, log in to your GMail account and click on Settings. After that click on Labs and scroll to where it says Multiple Inboxes. Enable the feature and click save settings. Once it is enabled, you’ll immediately see the changes apply to your inbox. To further configure the settings, click on Settings and then the Multiple Inboxes tab. About 5 panes can be added. You can specify the number of e-mails you want to show up in a pane and mark where you want the extra panes to be positioned.
Personally I don’t use the star or label system much on GMail so this feature doesn’t seem very useful to me. But I think it would be very useful for those who are a lot more organized than I am.
A feature that I would like to see added to GMail that is a similar idea to this one is to have separate panes for separate accounts. For example, I have multiple accounts with GMail. Both are pretty active, but in order to delete messages in both accounts I have to log into one account and log into the other. That gets annoying pretty quick. It’d be awesome to have a pane with one account’s e-mail and another pane with another account’s e-mail.
Amit Chowdhry | January 28, 2009 | 321 views | Comments Categorized under GMail, Google
GMail users will soon be able to compose messages and check e-mail without having to be connected to the Internet. Google is building a platform on Google Gears that will allow GMail users to cache messages, read your inbox, label messages, and write replies without being online. Then when the system connects to the web, the changes will be automatically applied.
This new feature is currently in beta and available in GMail Labs. This feature will be rolled out slowly to everyone and won’t be rolled out right away.
“Offline Gmail is still an early experimental feature, so don’t be surprised if you run into some kinks that haven’t been completely ironed out yet. We’ve been using offline Gmail internally at Google for quite a while (I’ve read thousands of messages and answered hundreds en route to visit my son and my daughter). And it’s saved me more than once when my home network connection ran into issues (we have squirrels at home that love to chew through outside cable wires),” wrote Andy Palay, a GMail engineer.
To see if you have the feature available, log in to your GMail account and click on the Settings link. After that click on the Labs tab and click Enable next to Offline GMail. Click Save Changes. When clicking on Save Changes, you’ll notice a Offline0.1 link at the upper left. Click on that link and you’ll be given instructions to set up GMail offline.
