Gmail gets New Look, How you can get it Too

It seems that Gmail, Google's free email service, is taking on the new look that Google.com got recently. It seems that this new red/grey look that Google.com, Google Maps, Google Calendar, and now Gmail, are all getting, is in celebration of Google's newly announced social network, Google+ (Google Plus).

Although Google+ is in an invite only stage, it is not a secretive project, and so we do know that Plus was the first service to receive the new Google look, so we can assume that Plus was the origin of the new theme.

So know that you know why Gmail looks different, you probably are wondering why it doesn't look different. Any change can scare users, so, at least for now, the new Gmail theme is a choice. In my opinion, a good choice, which is why I'm going to give you the simple steps to make this choice.

1. Log on to your Gmail account at mail.google.com. 
2. Look in the top right corner of the screen, where you will see a gear logo. Click on that.
3. A few options will come down. Click on Mail settings. 
4. A settings page with many tabs will appear, close to the right of the page, you will see Themes. Click on that.
5. The bottom row of themes will have Preview and Preview (Dense) in them. Dense is more compact, but both of them will give you the new look. Choose one, and click.
6. Viola! You are now seeing the Gmail's new look. Enjoy!

(To undo, follow these same steps, but instead of clicking on Preview or Preview (Dense), choose another theme.)

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Microsoft Confirms Hotmail Phishing Attack

According to PCMag.com, several thousand Hotmail usernames and passwords were exposed over the weekend via a phishing attack, which Microsoft confirmed on October 5.

In a phishing scheme, users are tricked into divulging confidential information, often account password and usernames. In this case, users could have used Hotmail to communicate with banks and other institutions, storing confidential information in their accounts. Users who believe they have fallen prey to a phishing scheme should change their passwords immediately, Microsoft advises.

PCMag.com reports that on October 6, Gmail, Google's email product, also fell prey to the phishing attack. As soon as Google learned of the attack, they forced password resets on the affected accounts. They will continue to force password resets on additional accounts when they become aware of them.

These attacks are a good reminder to exercise extreme caution when opening unsolicited email attachments and links from both known and unknown sources. All email users, regardless of what product they use, should install and regularly update their anti-virus software.

52% of Computer Users Look at Spam

According to a study released by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), 52% of computer users said that they have clicked on a spam e-mail.

Why? Seventeen percent said that they made a mistake, 12% said that they were interested in the product or service being offered, 13% said they simply had no idea why they did it, and another 6% "wanted to see what would happen."

Even though only a small percentage of computer users actually click on spam to try and purchase something, it remains profitable, as over 94% of email is spam, according to The New York Times.

[via Ars Technica]

Become a Gmail Ninja!

So, do you think you have what it takes to be a black belt in Gmail? How about a Gmail Master?

Google has released a Gmail tips website that uses different skill levels of "ninjas" to describe your mastery of the functions that Gmail offers. This site can be found here and is quite useful. It describes how to use video chat in Gmail, keyboard shortcuts, how to sign out of your account remotely, and more.

Judging by their rankings, it looks like I am moving into Gmail Black Belt territory. Let us know where you rate by leaving us a comment and also your favorite Gmail feature. For some inspiration on your electronic kung fu journey, go here.

Google Wave, The Future of Email?

Google recently made a huge splash at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco when it announced Google Wave, a new take on email and online collaboration. When I first saw it, I thought it looked like a Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Gmail mashup with an Outlook style interface. Here's a screenshot to give you an idea:

As you see, there is a lot going on in this interface. As Google describes it:

"A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time."

For a complete rundown, I would recommend visiting the "About Google Wave" page. Also, if you have time, I would encourage checking out the video below in which Google Wave is demonstrated. The video is lengthy, but incredibly interesting.

This looks amazing to me, and seems to take a greater step toward faster, more manageable online collaboration. You can try to sign up to "know when Google Wave will be ready" at this page if you're interested.

Did Twitter Save A Life -- Again?

While driving home recently, Atlanta Councilmember Kwanza Hall came upon an unconscious woman who needed medical attention. He asked those around the woman if they had called 911 – the emergency number. They had, but were unable to get through.

So Counselor Hall turned to Twitter to help summon aide. Here’s the story, as reported by Wired:


Did Twitter help save a life? In this instance – as in the instance when actress Demi Moore’s tweeted a fan’s suicide message – it is impossible to tell for certain. But it is clear that Twitter has not only leapt past email but is challenging the phone as a real time communication tool.

Gmail Suggests To Whom You Should Send Emails

Google keeps trying to help you send better emails with Gmail.

First, there was Mail Goggles, a feature to help you stop sending obnoxious, angry or flaming emails. Goggles, when enabled, will ask you a series of math questions before sending your email. The idea is that if you take a few minutes to cool down -- or sober up -- before hitting send, you might save yourself great embarrassment.

Then, came Undo Send, which puts a five to 10-second hold on all outgoing messages. So if you send an email with a typo, or to the wrong person, or one which might land you in hot water, you can undo it.

Now, Gmail Labs has created a “suggest more recipients” feature that suggests contacts that you might want to include in a group email based on the people you’ve grouped together as email recipients in the past. No more accidentally leaving out that important person who needs to know.

For example, if you often send family emails to your mother, father, spouse, sister and brother, when you start composing an email to your mother and father, Gmail will suggest adding your sister, spouse, and brother. The feature is triggered only after you’ve added at least two recipients to the email.

To enable the feature, go to Gmail Labs and turn it on as a setting.

[via TechCrunch]

Email Spam Damages the Environment

McAfee – the maker of personal computer security software – has reported that spam is not only a nuisance that hinders productivity, it also damages the environment and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.

The company has released the Carbon Footprint of Spam, which says that the annual energy used to transmit, process and filter spam totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours. That's equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes, with the same greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion gallons of gasoline.

The study looked at global energy expended to create, store, view and filter spam in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, India, Mexico, Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

McAfee points to late 2008 as an example of the potential energy savings of stopping spam. When McColo, a major source of online spam, was taken offline, global spam volume dropped 70%. According to McAfee, the energy saved during the time it took spammers to rebuild their sending capacity was equal to taking 2.2 million cars off the road that day, proving the impact of the 62 trillion spam e-mails that are sent each year.

Read more, including critics of the report.

[via Yahoo Tech]

Spam Makes up 94% of Email

Spam – those ever-present and annoying drug ads, announcements of lottery winnings, or dating services that show up in your inbox – make up about 94% of all email, according to The New York Times. This is back up to the level of last October.

Briefly, at the end of 2008, the amount of spam traffic was cut by 70% after the large Internet providers knocked offline a California web-hosting server that spammers were using to coordinate email attacks.

According to The Times, this year, average spam volumes have increased about 1.2% each day. And, “what the spammers have been using to rebuild is more technically advanced than what got taken out and is itself a more resilient technology,” explains a spokesperson for an email security company.

Undo Embarrassing Emails with Gmail's Undo Send

Tired of sending emails that you really should not have sent?

A few months ago, I wrote about Mail Goggles – a feature in Google’s gmail that, when enabled, will ask you a series of math questions before sending your email. The idea is that if you are not in the right state of mind to solve a few math problems, you might want to reconsider sending the email you just wrote.

Now Google has added another feature to gmail – Undo Send – that puts a five to 10-second hold on all outgoing messages. So if you sent an email with a typo, or to the wrong person, or one in which you said something you should not have, Undo Send can help you out.

Gmail users can enable the Undo Send feature by going into their Labs settings (the green flask at the top of the screen) and turning it on. When enabled, every time you send an e-mail, you'll see an undo link at the end of the confirmation message that appears at the top of your inbox. Do nothing and the email is sent. Click undo and the email reverts back to your compose screen.

Undo Send cannot pull back an email that has already gone out. But using it with Mail Goggles should help you stop sending embarrassing – or costly – emails.

[via Wired.com]

Social Networking Outpaces Email Around the World

More evidence that social networking is becoming one of the main reasons people access the Internet.

New statistics from Nielsen Online show that by the end of 2008, social networking had overtaken email in terms of worldwide reach. Sixty-eight percent of Internet users around the world used social network sites last year, compared to 65.1% for email. The most popular online activities remain search and Web portals, with around 85% reach, and the websites of software manufacturers.

This growth is led by Facebook, which is outpacing the growth of all other social network sites by ten times.

Social networkers spent 63% more time on member communities than they did in the previous year. Again, Facebook led the way, with its members spending 566% more time on it than in 2007.

Read the full report on Mashable.com.

Spam, Spam -- Wonderful Spam?

According to our Information Technology Department here at the City of Troy (the Library is a department of the City), in a typical week, the City receives 234,251 spam emails. Our spam-blocking software stops 93% of the emails, but that still leaves over 14,000 that get delivered.

That's 88 spam emails per hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, spread over 600+ Troy email accounts.

That's a lot of spam!

Avoiding Online Scams This Holiday Season

The Oprah Winfrey Show recently aired an episode dealing with online scams and how to avoid them. The show covered everything from those infamous emails saying that you won a foreign lottery to common eBay scams. Don't become a statistic! Read more about it here.

OtherInbox: My New Favorite Spam-Annihilator

If you are one of the many millions of people that suffers from spam or general inbox clutter, then you may be interested in a new email service at OtherInbox.com.

Otherinbox takes a different approach to email by allowing the user to create custom email addresses for each of his or her different social or shopping sites. Otherinbox organizes your email by site in an effort to manage spam and keep control of your inbox.

Here's a better description from the site:

OtherInbox is the email address I use for all the stuff I don't want coming to my main email address -- mostly shopping, news and social networking. Pretty much any time I'm not giving my email address to a real person I use my OtherInbox. That way, my main Inbox only has important stuff in it and everything else is in my OtherInbox. Once it's in there, OtherInbox automatically organizes everything for me into folders for each website. This saves me time because I can jump right to the messages I care about and easily ignore the ones that I'm not interested in reading right now. It also shows me what's really going on with my email address; if someone sells my information to spammers I know right away and can stop it.

How does it work? Instead of just having one email address, such as jbaer1975@gmail.com, I have unlimited email addresses at my own domain name, josh.otherinbox.com. I don't have to set them up ahead of time, I can just make them up as I go along. I give out a different email address to every website: Amazon gets amazon@josh.otherinbox.com and Facebook gets facebook@josh.otherinbox.com. This way OtherInbox can reliably sort everything coming back into folders. If anyone sells my email address I will know exactly who is responsible and I can Block that one email address so that I never see their emails again. It's powerful!

I've been using the site for several months and it is absolutely fantastic. The benefits to this system is that I can actually see who is spamming my email with unwanted messages, and block them from continuing.

The only downside to the program is that its in private beta still. Fortunately, for The Tech Desk readers, we have been given beta invites to give-away!

To get started visit this site and register for a free account. Then say goodbye to spam!

6 Tips for Reducing E-mail Overload

Do you find a big hassle going through the amount of ‘junk’ email you receive everyday? I certainly do, and was glad to find this interesting article by Kim Komando on the Microsoft Office Live Small Business Website, giving six easy tips for reducing the high email overload.

Slash the number of new messages

Your first goal is to reduce the amount of incoming e-mail. So cancel subscriptions to unwanted mailing lists. The messages become a nuisance if you don’t have time to read them.A good spam filter reduces the amount of spam reaching your inbox. But don’t expect to eliminate spam completely. Some will still get through.Do your friends send jokes or chain messages? Explain your situation and ask that they stop. Hopefully, they’ll oblige.

Respond appropriately

Not all e-mail requires a response. If you receive an e-mail addressed to several people, you may not need to respond. If a response is required, it may not need to go to everybody.Be brief and to the point; restrict your messages to a few sentences. If you can’t, pick up the phone or talk in person.If an e-mail contains several different points, respond to each in separate messages. This may take longer at first. But, it will be easier to deal with each e-mail thread.

Take advantage of subject lines

Subject lines should relate to the body of the e-mail. So be as descriptive as possible. Subject lines that say things like "question" or "hello" should be avoided. Recipients won’t know what the message is about. And it will be difficult for you to categorize responses.If you have a one-line e-mail, put it in the subject line. This will save you and the recipient valuable time.If possible, create a set of codes with your co-workers. Placed in the subject line, codes help you process and prioritize messages.For example, use "FYI" for informational messages. Use "AR" for action required and "URG" for urgent messages.

Forwarding and copying

Be courteous when forwarding an e-mail. Summarize the message and say why you’re forwarding it. This is particularly helpful if the e-mail contains several messages.Recipients will appreciate your thoughtfulness. They won’t need to read through several messages to guess your thoughts. This will cut down on questions from recipients.Don’t copy someone on a message unless it is necessary. And explain why you’re copying them. Recipients won’t need to guess your intentions. This means less back and forth messages.

Be disciplined

Avoid the temptation to check your e-mail every few minutes. Check it every hour on the hour for important messages. If you can go longer, do so. Of course, this might not be feasible in some work environments.Set time aside each morning and evening to process your inbox. When you’re done, it should be completely empty. File messages you need to keep. Set reminders for messages that require you to follow up.Respond to messages immediately, so you only read them once. There is an exception to this rule. If emotions might govern your response, give yourself a cooling-down period.

Use your e-mail program’s tools

Explore the tools your e-mail program offers. I already mentioned setting follow-up reminders. Filters and folders can help you file and prioritize mail. Auto-responders can alert business associates when you’re out of town. You won’t come back to a full inbox.

Take Another Look at That Email Before You Send It with Mail Goggles

How many of you have sent late night emails that you later regret? To bosses, co-workers, exes?

I know I have.

Well, if you use Google’s gmail, the company is trying to help you stop this behavior. Google Labs has just developed a new feature for gmail – Mail Goggles – that, when enabled, will ask you a series of math questions before sending your email. The idea is that if you are not in the right state of mind to solve a few math problems, you might want to reconsider sending the email you just wrote.

To enable Mail Goggles, in gmail go to Settings then Lab. Then, set when you want Mail Goggles to check your email -- and the difficulty of the math questions -- by going to Settings then General.

Now, quit sending those emails that you later regret.