The Inquisitr » gmail

Not so fast with the Hotmail jokes- additional 20K addresses compromised on GMail, AOL, Earthlink

Kim LaCapria — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:23:45 +0000

Yesterday, when it was revealed that tens of thousands of Hotmail addresses and passwords were posted on a code-sharing site, everyone had a bit of a go at the remaining Hotmail users who haven’t abandoned the service for a cooler GMail account.

But a second posting followed, with a list of Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Gmail, Comcast and Earthlink addresses. Collected as part of a phishing scam, the BBC reports that while some of the addresses are old, expired or invalid, several are confirmed as genuine. The lists are still accessible.

The BBC also reports that an estimated 40% of internet users have a life password, an inadvisable practice that simplifies logging in but leaves accounts much more open to hacking. Carol Theriault, of security firm Saphos, indicated that scams such as the one used to gather the e-mail addresses are growing increasingly slick and more difficult to detect:

“Phishing attacks are very subtle these days,” she said. “People do all kinds of tricky things.”

Fake websites, which ask for a users login details, can be made to look like those of reputable companies.

“This should be a wake-up call to Google and Microsoft to educate their users,” said Ms Theriault.

Yes, really: Judge orders GMail account closed because user received unsolicited e-mail

Kim LaCapria — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:00:01 +0000

Use your GMail account for everything?

If you do, this story will make you seriously uneasy. (And it’s not GMail’s fault.) This is a scary and dangerous precedent, and it could happen to any of us that use and love GMail, if it’s allowed to stand. A GMail user (like Joe You) received a random, mis-addressed e-mail from a bank employee. And because said user had the audacity to have a working e-mail address, his ass is being hauled into court:

According to a court document in the case, in August a customer of the Rocky Mountain Bank asked a bank employee to send certain loan statements to a representative of the customer. The employee, however, inadvertently sent the e-mail to the wrong Gmail address. Additionally, the employee had attached a sensitive file to the e-mail that should not have been sent at all.

The attachment contained confidential information on 1,325 individual and business customers that included their names, addresses, tax identification or Social Security numbers and loan information.

If this guy (or girl) was going to do something nefarious, they could or even would have done so immediately. (The breach was August 12th of this year.) Downloaded the information to a thumb drive, sold it on the black market, made wallpaper out of it… the point is that the data was sent out into the internet ether, and you can’t unring a bell. It’s the risk one takes when stupidly sending a sensitive file to a GMail address. But the scary part was not that the man ended up inadvertently in possession of the data- it’s what happened afterwards.

The bank responsible for the whole mess, the Rocky Mountain Bank, sued Google to reveal the user’s identity (pointless) and “deactivate” the user’s account. (Doubly pointless.) If the user was going to sell or otherwise share the information, he’d have done it already. Scarier still? The judge in the case granted it. So now this person, who committed the unthinkable crime of receiving an e-mail not intended for them, stands to lose all their work contacts, all their personal contacts, sentimental emails, actual work for work…

What do you store in your e-mail for reference? How screwed would you be if your GMail account was deactivated? And how could a decision like this stand in court when the actions approved by the judge clearly will do nothing to ensure the safety of the data, while managing to trample all over a person’s individual right to intellectual property? Does that only count if the intellectual property is owned by a corporation? And where does it stop? Can your computer be seized, too, if the wrong e-mail falls into your hands? After all, you could have saved the file.

[Via Consumerist]

Gmail Service Restored Following System Shutdown

AHN — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:18:25 +0000

Gmail users were unable to access the Google e-mail service Tuesday afternoon. The company has since restored the service.

The outage started Monday 1 p.m. Pacific time and service was restored to some users by 11:16 p.m. Tuesday, according to the Google App Status Dashboard.

David Besbris, an Engineering Director for Google, stated on the company’s blog, “Gmail should be back up and running as usual. We’re still investigating the root cause of this outage, and we’ll share more information soon. Thanks for bearing with us.”

The service is accessible through Outlook or POP3 and IMAP for iPhone customers.

Tuesday’s disruption has been the second wide and long disruption to Gmail since May 14.

[Image: Venturebeat]

Just in: GMail is down, for now

Kim LaCapria — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:01:30 +0000

You can quit hitting refresh, GMail is definitely down or spotty for many users right now.

Mashable reported that many frustrated tweeters are complaining about the outage (on Twitter, natch) and Google has acknowledged the intermittent access issues:

“We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 4:53:00 PM UTC-4 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 5:16:00 PM UTC-4 with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience. Users can access their email via IMAP or POP. You can find instructions for how to do this here.”

Thank God for Twitter and Facebook- otherwise we might be forced to go outside and get some fresh air.

How to Make Gmail Your Ultimate Productivity Center

Leo Babauta — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 05:32:35 +0000

These days there are a proliferation of digital tools we use for productivity, for time management, for communication, for social networking, for keeping track of our lives, online and off.

It can be a nightmare to keep track of it all, and frankly, it’s a bit unproductive to keep switching between a dozen different tools.

Enter Gmail, my favorite solution for just about anything. OK, maybe not for things like solving marital problems or spending time with my kids, but … give it time.

It’s already pretty clear that Gmail is the best tool for email, and integrations with calendar and chat have made it the go-to place for much of our information. But Gmail Gadgets have allowed us to bring the rest of the pieces of the puzzle together. Now we can do just about everying in one place – Gmail.

Here’s how:

1. Email: Gmail is how email should be done. With great filters, you can keep your inbox fairly clean. With keyboard shortcuts, you can get through the inbox in minutes. With labels and archiving, you don’t spend time filing. With threaded conversations, your email stays organized. There are dozens of smart little innovations, from automatic contacts to a “send and archive” button and much more. If you’re not using Gmail for email yet, you should strongly consider a change.

2. To-do: Gmail only recently added a Tasks feature, something most of us have been wanting for a long time. It’s just about the simplest to-do list there is. You add a task. You check it off. You can re-order them. That’s about it. But it’s incredibly useful, because here’s the trick: you’re zooming through your inbox, and when you find an email that requires an action … you add it to the task list in Gmail. Then you archive the email, instead of leaving it in your inbox. Result: clear inbox! Cool feature: you can turn an email into a task, which means the task is linked to the email, and you can easily open the email by clicking on the task. Enable Gmail Tasks by going to Labs (in the upper right corner of Gmail). For Remember the Milk users, there’s also an RTM gadget of course.

3. Calendar. Google’s Calendar (Gcal) is hands down the fastest, easiest and best calendar I’ve used (and yes, I’ve tried iCal, Outlook, 30 Boxes and Sunbird). It just works exactly like you’d want it to work. And now it’s in Gmail’s sidebar, so you can see your events at a glance while in Gmail, and even add tasks quickly without having to go to the calendar. Also cool: Gcal, like Google Docs and Gmail (see below) now has an offline mode, so you don’t have to worry about being connected to the Internet. Enable the GCal gadget in Gmail by going to Labs.

4. Docs. Are you still using a desktop word processing or spreadsheet app? Consider switching to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which I use exclusively now. It’s online (with offline access now), it’s simple, it opens the usual formats, and it’s so much better for collaboration. Seriously — no more emailing different versions to people. Best yet, no need to sync docs between computers or carry them around on a USB flash drive. And now, with the Docs gadget in Gmail, you can open your docs from within Gmail, making it even more of a one-stop center for all your productivity and information needs. Enable the Google Docs gadget in Gmail by going to Labs (in the upper right corner of Gmail).

5. Twitter. A lot of people are finding Twitter to be an incredible place to connect with others, to find great things to read, to keep in touch with what’s happening now. But keeping your Twitter app open all the time can be unproductive. Enter Twitter Gadget, which takes seconds to install into Gmail and lets you have the most important functions of Twitter right within your all-in-one productivity center — you can see your Twitter stream, replies, direct messages, and favorites, and send out Tweets quickly. Granted, it’s not as nice and fully-functional as other great Twitter apps (Tweetdeck comes to mind), but it does the job quickly and painlessly.

6. Bookmarks. Want to look up a site you bookmarked earlier? I’ve been using the delicious gadget for Gmail, and it works pretty much as you’d expect — you can see a list of your most recent bookmarks in the Gmail sidebar. You can even see the most popular bookmarks on delicious right now, which is cool. Having your bookmarks right within Gmail is a nice feature that brings together a lot of your online life.

7. Text, voice and video chat. I use the Gmail chat for all my chat needs (which are fairly minimal), because I can do it from within Gmail. And now you can use Gmail chat for video and voice — I’ve done it, and it’s super simple and works great. With these additions, Gmail takes care of all my communication needs.

8. Social media. What about other social media you might use, such as Facebook, MySpace or Friendfeed? Put them right in Gmail with the Facebook, MySpace and Friendfeed gadgets. There are even gadgets for Digg and Flickr.

9. RSS feeds. I think Google Reader is the best RSS reader for its speed and simplicity. However, while you used to be able to add Google Reader to Gmail using a Greasemonkey script, with the newer version of Gmail that script became unusable. So what I do now is add Google Reader to my Firefox sidebar, so I can easily check my RSS feeds while in my all-in-one Gmail productivity center (only works in Firefox afaik).

10. Managing your gadgets. As you can tell, this is a lot of gadgets to add to Gmail. You can end up with a ton of gadgets running down the left side of Gmail’s window. I recommend, if you have a fairly wide monitor, that you move the labels and chat boxes to the right side. Also, you can minimize any of the gadgets with a click (there’s a minimize button at the top of each gadget), to keep things manageable. Finally, get rid of gadgets you don’t use very often, to simplify things.

11. Offline Gmail. One of the problems people use to have with Gmail is that it’s online — meaning that if you can’t connect to the Internet (if you’re on the road, on an airplane, or your connection goes down), you can’t use Gmail. Well, that’s now changed with Gmail’s offline mode — you can read, compose and organize messages while offline, which is nice.

Most Important Tip
Finally, now that you’ve set up Gmail to do everything you need it to, here’s the most important tip for staying productive: don’t keep it open all the time.

Ideally, schedule certain times to use Gmail and the other gadgets you have set up — maybe 2-3 times during the day. Or close it when you’re ready to work on an important task, and then open it when you’re done with the task, but only for 10 minutes. Find what works for you, but set your limits and stick to them!

Leo Babauta writes at Zen Habits.

GMail’s ultimate gift to mankind

Steven Hodson — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:45:00 +0000

I would bet that just about anyone reading this post still has one or two newsletter, or newslist, types of emails that they are no longer interested in coming into their email inboxes. These are the one’s that we signed up for as part of some service we thought was cool at the time or some site’s mailing list that we thought we would always be interested in. Things change, interests move on but still we get those emails coming but now they are caught by filters or rules and shuffled off to the trash bin.

Much of the time this happens because we forget the information we provided when we signed up. Even myself I still have four or five emails coming in regularly but they head to the junk folder because I’ll be damned if I can remember some obscure password I might have used at the time.

Well I just found out via Zee over at TheNextWeb.com that Google’s GMail has come to the rescue with a new feature that attempts to help you with this problem. As of today you can now use the Unsubscribe tool to have GMail send an unsubscribe request on your behalf at the same time as you mark the email as spam.

From the GMail support page on this new option

You’ll see the unsubscribe tool when you mark a message from particular types of mailing lists as spam. If the particular message is a misuse of a mailing list you like to receive, you can Report spam as usual. But if you never want to receive another message or newsletter from that list again, click Unsubscribe instead. We’ll send a request to the sender that your email address be removed from the list. It’s that simple!”

This almost makes me want to use Gmail for a week or so.

Google’s secret to taking over the world

Steven Hodson — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 18:36:44 +0000

There is no denying the fact that Google is a big believer in cloud computing and web based software. In fact much of their future growth is built on the principal of getting as many people as possible using their software whether it be Google search, Gmail or their Google Docs suite of office type programs. This of course is putting them in direct competition with Microsoft which means it has had to find different ways to get their software in the hands of consumers.

One of the principal ways that they have done this is to use the same tactic that Apple and Microsoft have been using for years – hit the colleges and universities. The first prong of their attach started over two years ago with them making the education providers an offer they couldn’t really refuse in a climate of growing IT costs. Google would provide them unlimited hosted email and other applications all of which would be branded by the institution for the price of – free.

With things like their browser, a possible operating system, and the in development Google Wave being added to this package Google has a chance to become an ingrained part of the student’s lives as they move from school to the business world. Right now Google is already providing services to some 4 million students and is providing serious competition to Microsoft for access to 17 million students on the more than 4,000 campuses in the US.

The campus push is part of Google’s broader bid to breed a generation of workers comfortable with the concept of "cloud" computing, and particularly Google’s version of it, where Google provides free web-based services in exchange for advertising dollars. "We want to build relationships with these users for life," said Jeff Keltner, Google’s business development manager for the program.

Source: Business Insider – Google’s 17 Million Built-in Chrome OS Users (GOOG)

The ability to offer colleges and universities a way to save millions of dollars a year in IT costs is making Google an almost irresistible force for these institutions while at the same time creating a constantly refreshing generation of Google users.

Let’s all get a woodie over removing a beta label

Steven Hodson — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:08:40 +0000

While the rest of the real world is sucking back all the Michael Jackson Memorial news it can those of us in the tech world are falling to our knees to report on how Google has removed the Beta tag from Google Apps and Gmail. When I fired up FeedDemon this morning to get started on my day I was inundated with what seemed like a flood of news from all the major tech blogs about this blogosphere shaking news.

Just to give you an idea of the coverage here’s a list of blogs that I follow who wrote about this monumental event

After five years, Gmail is ‘beta’ no more! – The Raw Feed
Wait. “Gmail Beta” Isn’t a Registered Trademark? – Digital Daily
Gmail and other Google Apps ‘Out of Beta’ – TheNextWeb.com
Google finally rips the beta label off Gmail and other Google Apps – VentureBeat
Google Apps Leaves the Beta Label Behind – GigaOM
Google Finally Peels The Beta Label Off Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and GTalk – TechCrunch

That it took a company like Google the better part of five years for Gmail and two years or so for Google Apps to figure out that corporate IT had a problem using applications marked beta across their networks is a tad on the ridiculous side. This was nothing more than a marketing and PR move as nothing has changed with any of these beta stripped applications that makes them anymore of a finished product than they were before.

While the beta labeling of their software may have provided them with some legal protection they are now acknowledging that these are indeed finished and complete software applications. So it will be interesting to see what happens the next time Google Apps or GMail suffers a massive outage or data loss.

I will admit though as pointless as this type of news is it is fun to watch how everyone literally falls over themselves to get those posts out there whenever Google does anything.

image courtesy of WorldGaming

GTFO: Five years on, Google finally adds drag and drop to Gmail

Duncan Riley — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:12:11 +0000

Miracles do happen: Google has finally added the ability to drag and drop emails into folders/ labels some five years after launching the service.

The drag and drop feature means that Gmail has come into the ~~21st~~ 20th century by offering a feature ~~many~~ all its competitors offer. Being Google though the feature isn’t a straight forward as it seems, as emails can only be dragged from the left hand side.

Google also announced that labels have been moved from a separate box to the inbox/ sent menu list. Most label’s will also now be automatically hidden, with only commonly used labels appearing.

Be it five years too late, the announcement is great news for Gmail fans.

Google Adds Message Translation Into Gmail Labs

JR — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:33:53 +0000

Google has introduced a new autotranslation feature into its Gmail Labs menu. Gmail Message Translation helps you detect what language a message was sent in, then convert it into your own.

Gmail Message Translation

Once you enable Message Translation, any message in a foreign language will have a link at the top: “Translate message to: English” (or whatever your default language is). One click, and the message will be converted.

“If all parties are using Gmail, you can have entire conversations in multiple languages with each participant reading the messages in whatever language is most comfortable for them,” says Gmail Software Engineer Darren Lewis.

“I use this feature everyday to help me work with teammates around the globe (they think my Japanese is much better than it really is…shhhh!),” he jokes.

Gmail Message Translation is now available in the Gmail Labs menu found under the green lab symbol on the top right of the page.

Best Gmail Feature Ever: Forgotten Attachment Detector

Duncan Riley — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 01:01:47 +0000

New features in Gmail seem to be a dime a dozen lately, from drunk email protection through to viewing YouTube videos inline. Some of the features rolled out in Gmail Labs have been useful before, but none perhaps as useful as the latest: “Forgotten Attachment Detector.”

The Forgotten Attachment Detector uses the same technology behind Google’s ad platform to detect whether you’ve mentioned in your email that you were going to add an attachment. If you hit send without having set up an attachment, you receive a pop up that asks if you meant to add an attachment or not. If you haven’t mentioned an attachment in your email, you simply don’t get the box, and it’s business as usual.

Maybe not everyone occasionally forgets to add an attachment to an email, but I’d bet many do. I unfortunately do it regularly, getting carried away with the email then forgetting to add the relevant attachment. As a pure and simple value add this is brilliant and a step that will save me on a regular basis.

To switch on Forgotten Attachment Detector, go to Settings/ Labs then scroll down the page to find the option.

Gmail (Finally) Adds Inline Image Support

JR — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:51:03 +0000

Gmail is finally getting more intuitive support for images within e-mails. The Google gang announced the addition of “Insert Image” functionality within Gmail Labs this morning.

The feature, quite simply, lets you click on an icon to upload an image either from your computer or from another Web site and have it be embedded within your message. You (somewhat surprisingly) do have to activate the feature within the Labs menu first, or it won’t show up. You also have to be in rich formatting mode for the feature to appear.

“Well, it’s about time,” Gmail Software Engineer Kent Tamura writes in his official blog posting. I think that pretty much sums it up.

Google

Gmail Autopilot: Google’s Getting a Good Laugh Today

JR — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:30:26 +0000

Google’s getting its annual April Fools’ chuckle in more than one way today. The Gmail team’s announcement of a new Gmail Autopilot feature has become one of the hottest search terms of the morning.

Gmail Autopilot

The Gmail Autopilot gag shows up as a link at the top of Gmail’s Web interface. Clicking the link takes you to this page, which states:

“As more and more everyday communication takes place over email, lots of people have complained about how hard it is to read and respond to every message. This is because they actually read and respond to all their messages.”

The page goes on to provide examples of how the Autopilot feature can help, such as responding to business proposals:

Managing relationships:

And matching your personal style:

Google April Fools!

While Reddit’s Reddigg prank was no doubt a winner, Gmail’s Autopilot — judging by the strong response it’s getting Web-wide — is definitely right up there, too. You can read about some of Google’s past April Fools’ jokes here.

Gmail ‘Undo Send’: Is This Really Useful at All?

JR — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:58:27 +0000

Gmail unveiled a new “Undo Send” feature in its Labs menu this week. When I saw the announcement about it yesterday, I quickly shrugged and moved on. I’ve since been surprised to see how much glowing coverage the feature has inspired across the blogosphere.

“Undo Send” is great in theory: Once you activate it, Gmail adds an option onto the sent mail confirmation screen that lets you grab back a message before it goes out. We’ve all hit “send” and then realized we messed something up, right? So wouldn’t that addition be a nice way to backtrack?

Of course. But Gmail’s “Undo Send” gives you only five seconds to hit the panic button and reclaim the e-mail. I don’t know about you, but my odds of catching a post-send error in five seconds aren’t high.

If Gmail wants to give you an option to grab back a message, it needs to increase the delay by a bit more than that. I’d say 30 seconds would be the minimum for the feature to have any use whatsoever. People who want their e-mails sent instantly can leave the option off, but if you enable an “Undo Send” feature, you presumably accept the slight delay that comes with it.

“Undo Send” is a good idea, but I struggle to see how often it’ll prove useful in its current incarnation.

Google

Gmail Suffers Another Outage

JR — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:48:29 +0000

Outages sure do seem to come in ways for Gmail: The Google mail service has confirmed it is dealing with another bout of problems this week.

The latest outage, reported by the BBC, is (as usual) said to affect a “small subset of users.” Google gave the BBC its standard Gmail downtime statement:

“We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are having difficulty accessing their accounts. The team is working as quickly as they can to resolve the problem. We know how important e-mail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously.”

Gmail was down for a few hours late in February. Google engineers followed that incident by releasing a new App Status Dashboard to help users monitor the status of Gmail and other Google services.

February’s outage was Gmail’s sixth documented downtime in the past eight months. Overall, though, Google reports that Gmail has an average uptime rate of 99.9 percent, despite the highly publicized nature of its occasional issues.

Google

Report: More Than a Third of Yahoo’s Traffic is From Yahoo Mail

JR — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:56:25 +0000

Yahoo’s mail platform sees more traffic than its search site, a new analysis finds.

Following a presentation by new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz this week in which Bartz noted that Yahoo Mail was “becoming increasing critical to the company,” Hitwise compared data from the various Yahoo properties to see just how big a slice of the overall pie Yahoo Mail really took. The data shows Yahoo Mail receiving well over a third of Yahoo’s overall traffic, at 36.71 percent. The Yahoo home page comes in next with 25.48 percent, and the direct Yahoo Search page follows with 11.75.

Yahoo Mail, Hitwise also notes, is still the dominant Webmail provider. Stats from February put Yahoo Mail at about 56 percent of the overall U.S. Webmail market. Windows Live Mail takes 19 percent, and Gmail rounds out the top three with about 11 percent.

With that being said, Windows Live Mail saw a 25 percent drop in traffic from February ‘08 to February ‘09. Gmail saw growth of 88 percent in the same time period, while Yahoo Mail remained relatively constant with a growth of 3 percent from year-to-year.

Yahoo

iGoogle Gets Direct Access to Gmail Chat

JR — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:11:49 +0000

Google’s Gmail Chat (aka Google Talk) feature is now available within your custom iGoogle homepage.

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.

Google

Google Introduces App Status Dashboard to Deal with Downtime

JR — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:50:42 +0000

Google has unveiled a new Apps Status Dashboard following this week’s Gmail outage. The new utility lets you monitor the service status of various Google services, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs.

Google Apps Status Dashboard

The new Google Apps Status Dashboard, announced in a blog posting late Wednesday afternoon, is touted as being a step toward greater transparency within Google’s services. Representatives directly tied its release to Tuesday’s Gmail outage, citing the need for better communication.

“The Google Apps Status Dashboard represents an additional layer of transparency that we believe will be particularly useful for our business users, and it’s also relevant to users of our consumer products,” writes Tessa Prescott, a member of the Google Apps sales team.

The Google Apps Status Dashboard also provides additional tools for paying Google Apps customers to monitor their services’ functionalities.

Google has yet to release any type of explanation for Tuesday’s Gmail outage, though representatives did issue an apology for the inconvenience. The outage was Gmail’s sixth period of extended downtime in the past eight months.

Google

Gmail Adds New Custom Title Bar Labs Feature

JR — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:59:43 +0000

Following its day of nonstop downtime coverage, Google is releasing some slightly less negative news this Wednesday: a new Gmail Labs feature that lets you customize the browser title bar.

The option, now available in the Gmail Labs menu, lets you choose to place your inbox count before the word “Gmail” in the browser bar. That way, you can see how many new messages you have at a quick glance on a toolbar or inactive tab.

A handy little feature–though one already familiar to users of Gina Trapani’s Better Gmail Firefox extension, which has offered the option for quite some time.

Google

Google Releases Update on Gmail Downtime

JR — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:41:58 +0000

Google has released an update on the outage that caused a few hours of Gmail downtime overnight. Gmail was completely unavailable from approximately 4:30 a.m. until 7:00 a.m. ET.

Gmail Outage: The Latest

Google says the Gmail problem is now fully resolved, though you may have to fill in a CAPTCHA box before being able to access your account once again. As for what actually happened, Google doesn’t have a whole lot of answers just yet.

“We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We’re really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could,” writes Acacio Cruz, Gmail site reliability manager. “Our priority was to get you back up and running. Our engineers are still investigating the root cause of the problem.”

Cruz went on to say that he wanted to “stress that this [was] an unusual occurrence.”

Gmail previously suffered a significant outage about six months ago, in August of 2008.