Were you among the unlucky .8% of GMail users whose accounts were affected by a recent spate of chat and email deletions?

If so, you should have access to all the previously unavailable data thought to have possibly been consumed by the cloud. After nearly five days of uncertainty, Google added a late night/early morning update (1:51 AM) to its Apps Status Dashboard, confirming data had been restored for most affected users:

The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.

However, some users may be experiencing unspecified other ongoing problems with their GMail accounts related to Sunday’s service disruption. The update continued:

Gmail should be back to normal for the vast majority of people affected by this issue. If you are still experiencing an issue, please contact us at gmail-maintenance@google.com. Thanks again for bearing with us.

If you were affected by the service issues, has your account returned to normal? If not, what hasn’t yet been resolved?

Google says data restored for all GMail accounts is a post from: The Inquisitr

What would you do if you woke up tomorrow and all your saved GMail information was gone?

That is not the plot of a new scary movie- it actually happened to almost 1% of GMail users, users who as of now are unable to access their stored GMail and old chats. Engadget described the horror, initially estimating 500,000 affected users but revising it down to 150,000- still staggering:

“[150K] Gmail users lost access to their inboxes this morn, and some of them are reporting (via Twitter and support forums) that years worth of messages, attachments and Google Chat logs had vanished by the time they were finally able to log on. While we haven’t experienced the issue personally, we’re hearing that the bug effectively reset some accounts, treating their owners as new users complete with welcome messages.”

The problem has yet to be completely resolved, and Engadget says Google’s prognosis has been “promising but terribly vague [about] when the situation will be resolved.” Are you one of the unlucky .8%? Would a GMail account deletion be catastrophic for you, or merely an inconvenience?

Worst fears confirmed- 150K lose all saved GMails, chats is a post from: The Inquisitr

Move over, Skype, you fat ass.

Google’s taken its already largely superior email service and added one more pretty amazing feature that is likely to piss off some pay to play companies. As of today, you can now make phone calls straight from an open GMail window, and they’re free within the US and Canada at least until the end of 2010. (That particular caveat is curiosity-piquing, because paying for domestic calls is likely to be at least on the table if they thought to say so.)

I’ve always found Skype to be a pain in the ass at the best of times- it was so resource draining it refused to run on my old Dell laptop (a pretty powerful if sucky machine) and the sound quality has always struck me as so-so. The interface is also not very intuitive, versus the GMail phone call interface, which appears to just be a giant pop-up keypad. If you’ve got a Google Voice account, that number will be displayed when you make outgoing calls, and you can receive calls to that number in GMail.

If you haven’t gotten an option to use it yet, GMail says it’s coming:

We’re rolling out this feature to U.S. based Gmail users over the next few days, so you’ll be ready to get started once “Call Phones” shows up in your chat list (you will need to install the voice and video plug-in if you haven’t already). If you’re using Google Apps for your school or business, then you won’t see it quite yet. We’re working on making this available more broadly – so stay tuned!

I haven’t gotten mine yet, but I’ll be keeping an eye out- if anything, I won’t have to walk across the room to get my phone anymore, or out to the car if I’ve left it there. Are you excited about this feature? Think it will replace some or all of your phone service?

GMail puts a phone in your email is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google added the chat functionality into iGoogle this week, noting that with the recent redesign, Gmail access was available — but instant messaging was not.

“Having the ability to work on email right on my iGoogle page has been awesome, but I simply couldn’t get the same Gmail experience without the chat feature,” writes Google Talk engineer Rhett Robinson.

The new function pulls your chat settings from Gmail and gives you a similar setup. It also adds an option for non-Gmail users to sign up for iGoogle-based chat with any working e-mail address.

Google has been testing the feature on a small-scale for some time, Robinson says. It will be rolled out to all U.S.-based iGoogle users over the coming days. You can manually add it onto your account immediately, however, by clicking here.

iGoogle Gets Direct Access to Gmail Chat is a post from: The Inquisitr

In case you didn’t see the original story, word leaked last week that Gmail Labs would be adding an SMS chat option. It’ll let you send a text message to any U.S. mobile phone through Gmail’s Web-based chat interface. All of your texts will come from a specific and constant 406 area code, so people can text back to you and their messages will show up in your chat window — just like a normal IM-style conversation.

Google Product Manager Leo Dirac now reveals, however, that his team came across an unexpected problem in the final moments of testing. “We found a glitch,” he says. “When you’d try to turn it on, it wouldn’t fully enable. We thought about keeping it out there — bugs and all — but the experience wasn’t that great.”

As a result, Dirac says, SMS chat has been put on hold until it can be fixed. He predicts we’ll see the feature appear within the next two weeks, though, so hopefully you won’t be holding your breath for long.

(Image: Webmonkey)

Gmail’s Free Texting — What Happened? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google may have killed its free “Send to Phone” online text messaging tool, but now it’s replacing it with an even easier SMS solution, according to published reports.

Gmail SMS chat is expected to debut today, tech blog Webmonkey reports. The service — as-of-yet unannounced on the official Gmail Blog — will let you send text messages to cell phones directly from Gmail’s chat interface, the blog says.

Once active, Webmonkey says the function will show up in the Labs menu within Gmail. (As of now, it’s not popping up in mine.) Supposedly, once it’s running, you can then just type in any mobile number, and your message will be delivered as a text. Webmonkey says the message will come from one of several thousands of reserved 406 area code numbers. The same number, it says, will remain constant with your account.

If the service works as touted, this actually sounds pretty handy. The description indicates that the mobile user will be able to text back to you, and their message will pop up in your Gmail chat window — just like any other normal chat message.

There are several other free Web-based texting tools around, but for those of us who have Gmail open often, this functionality will be a welcomed addition, both in the convenient placement and in the interactive back-and-forth chat ability already available in AOL’s Instant Messenger platform. Let’s hope it debuts as predicted — and doesn’t get beaten down by the climbing number of sneaky fees popping up in the text messaging world and costing companies extra for these sorts of services.

(Image: Webmonkey)

Update: Gmail’s Free Texting: What Happened?

Report: Gmail to Get Free Texting Today is a post from: The Inquisitr