GOOGLE LAUNCHES NEW GMAIL LOOK

Hot on the heels of the newly revamped Reader, Google is rolling out a new Gmail. Gmail’s conversation view has been streamlined and now includes photos of each contact. Additionally, it will automatically resize itself to look best depending on your screen size thanks to a new “elastic density feature.” Themes now support HD images and there is a new “smarter navigation” panel on the left hand side of the display that is customizable. Google also added a drop-down search box for more accurate email searches. The software giant says users will begin to see the option to “switch to the new look” in the bottom right-hand of their inbox over the next few days. Check out the video below for more features.

HOTMAIL TURNS 15

Hotmail has turned 15 years old this week. It may have fallen out of style, but the web mail service is still chugging along, and Microsoft is continuing to make improvements to the platform. Still, there was a time long ago when Microsoft didn’t own Hotmail, and the service was one of the few – if not the leading – provider of free Web-based email.

Many people laugh and scoff at Hotmail, but it’s still one of the largest email providers on the Web and many people still love and cling to their Hotmail accounts. The service has over 360 million unique users each month, and according to Microsoft, they filter out 98% of all spam messages that come in to the service.

Microsoft is playing up their recent improvements to Hotmail, like making it 10x faster than last year, integrating Facebook chat, and the ability to import and manage accounts from Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL all in the same interface. They’re also touting Hotmail’s integration with Windows Live SkyDrive – a kind of Dropbox competitor – as a quick and easy way to manage attachments like photos and video without having to worry about them clogging up your inbox.

However, even with all of those features, many will assure you that those 360 million uniques are either spammers with hundreds of accounts, or people who are simply keep their old email accounts live, but have long ago moved on.

Regardless of how you use Hotmail, or if you use it at all, it’s a pretty big achievement that the service is still here and going strong after 15 years. When Microsoft initially acquired the service, most people were frightened that they would shutter it, and they almost did when they tried to roll it into MSN Mail, and then again into Windows Live Mail. The Hotmail brand has managed to survive and persevere, and eventually Microsoft embraced it.

Microsoft says they have big plans in store for Hotmail, which is good news when competing services like Gmail continue to evolve and draw new users.

GOOGLE'S GMAIL AND CALENDAR TO GET SIMPLIER INTERFACE

Does Gmail's current look seem chaotic and claustrophobic to you? Are you overwhelmed by the myriad mailing options, labels, and chat windows? We aren't either, but apparently Google sees things differently, and has an interface overhaul planned that'll simplify things in your webmail world. It looks like the spacious and simple design language from Google + will carry over to all the web services proffered by the gang in Mountain View. For now, it's available as a couple of simplistic skins to be tried on in the Themes tab of your Gmail settings, with more permanent changes rolling out in the coming months. Google Calendar is slated for a stripped-down wardrobe in the next few days as well, with El Goog promising more cosmetic and functional changes for both services later this summer. In the meantime, the company's looking for feedback on its new interface so it can fix any issues folks find.

GOOGLE ADMITS SOME SENSITIVE EMAILS HACKED; BLAMES CHINA

The Contagio security blog posted evidence back in February of targeted attacks against government and military officials on Gmail. Today, nearly four months later, Google has finally admitted this is true: hundreds of personal accounts have been compromised by hackers it believes to be working out of Jinan, the capital of China's Shandong province.

The accounts include those of "senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists." The hijackers' aim appears to have been to spy on their targets using Google's automatic forwarding function. But unlike the PSN fiasco, Google insists its internal systems "have not been affected." Instead it seems the hackers used a phishing scam, possibly directing users to a spoof Gmail website before requesting their credentials.

Google says its own "abuse detection systems" disrupted the campaign -- but in a footnote right down at the bottom of their official blog page they also credit Contagio and user reports.

China's Foreign Minister, Hong Lei responded with a statement saying "Allegations that the Chinese government supports hacking activities are completely unfounded and made with ulterior motives."

LEAK: EVO 4G GETTING GINGERBREAD FRIDAY JUNE 6TH

After Sprint's website snafu outing its Android 2.3 intentions for the EVO 4G, sources uncovered evidence that points to June 6th as its release date. Better yet, if you're willing to manually check for its availability, you might even find a happy surprise this Friday.

In addition to Gingerbread, users will find SMS and Gmail fixes, along with a tweak to the phone's power management software. Hopefully you've got WiMAX, because this update is coming over-the-air.

LEAK: GOOGLE CHROME NOTEBOOKS COMING IN JUNE/JULY

Neowin has confirmed from a reliable source that the Google Chrome OS based notebooks will be available for "purchase" in late June/early July. The search giant also is planning on using an unconventional form of distribution to customers. Google will be selling the devices as part of a subscription based model with Gmail to customers. It's not clear if this applies to mainstream Gmail.com users, or to Google Apps premier customers.

According to our source, Google plans to make the notebooks available for $10-$20 a month per user, and will provide hardware refreshes as they are released as part of the package, and will replace faulty hardware for the life of the subscription. On top of this, Google will make the devices available for a one time payment as a normal retailer would, but is likely to not distribute the devices directly. Instead, the company will distribute them in a fashion similar to the way Android is distributed.

CHINA DENIES TAMPERING WITH GMAIL

On Monday, Google expressed its belief that its email users in China were experiencing "a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail." Now, as is par for this thorny course, the Chinese state has come out with a terse rebuttal, saying simply that "this is an unacceptable accusation." The retort was, says the BBC, part of a regular news conference on Tuesday and it doesn't appear that any more time was spent on the subject.

GOOGLE SAYS CHINA BLOCKING GMAIL

Google and China have a long history of conflict stemming from the work of Chinese hackers to gain access to the inboxes of thousands of Gmail-using political dissidents… a conflict which finally resulted in Google pulling itself from the country.

Now the search giant is accusing the Chinese government of hacking Gmail and disrupting service to the popular webmail provider because of fears of a “jasmine revolution,” or an uprising of the oppressed similar to that which has happened over the course of the last month in Middle Eastern countries like Libya, Egypt, etc.

China’s interference with Google makes it appear as if Google’s services are having technical problems, even when they’re not. Users and advertisers within China have complained about numerous technical issues plaguing Gmail within the country, including difficulty sending messages, marking messages as read, and so on.

Google says there is no problem with the service on their end. In fact, they explicitly say it’s because China is blocking Gmail, but trying to make it look like they’re not involved.

“Relating to Google there is no issue on our side. We have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail,” said a Google spokesperson.

This is just another in a long line of moves on the part of the Chinese government to suppress the Internet’s ability to coordinate political dissident. Consequently, China has been doing everything possible to lock Western companies like Google out of the country, even having gone so far as to launch their own search engine, Panguso, through the state run China Mobila telecom.

GMAIL GETS SMART LABELS

Google Software Engineer Stanley Chen revealed the latest addition to Gmail’s feature set, Smart Labels. The new labeling system, which can be turned on via the Labs section of Gmail, tries to help you automatically organize incoming email.

“Smart Labels automatically categorizes incoming Bulk, Notification and Forum messages, and labels them as such,” reads the announcement.

“‘Bulk’ mail includes any kind of mass mailing (such as newsletters and promotional email) and gets filtered out of your inbox by default (where you can easily read it later),

‘Notifications’ are messages sent to you directly (like account statements and receipts), and email from group mailing lists gets labeled as ‘Forums.’”

Smart Labels can be tweaked and customized to fit your workflow and function in harmony with Gmail’s Filters. The new feature is available to all Gmail users immediately.

GMAIL BACK UP FOR MOST USERS; NO LOST DATA

Google has been working overtime to restore users data to Gmail. Google said the issue was caused by a bug in new storage software they implemented over the weekend. The exact bug was not disclosed. The bug affected only about 0.02% or 40,000 users, however if you were one of those 40,000 you were probably freaking out.

Google further stated that everyone will get back all their data, including emails, contacts and calendar appointments. As a safety measure, the company backs up data on offline tapes, which makes restoring the data more time consuming than transferring requests between data centers, Ben Treynor, Google VP of engineering, said.

It’s important to note that email sent to users between 6:00 PM PST on February 27 and 2:00 PM PST on February 28 was likely not delivered to the mailbox, and the senders would have received a notification that their messages weren’t delivered.

GMAIL MESSAGES DISAPPEARING

If you've got a working Gmail account, you might want to back it up every so often -- as many as 500,000 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. For its part, Google says that the issue "affects less than .29% of the Google Mail userbase," engineers are working to fix the issue right now, and that missing messages will be restored as soon as possible.

FACEBOOK GOOGLE BATTLE ROYAL CONTINUES

Late last year, Google surprised everyone by suddenly blocking Facebook from being able to import contacts from new users’ Gmail accounts.

When it happened, everyone knew that we were watching two tech giants exchange their first earth-shaking blows for the future of the web. It’s only gotten worse from there as the two colossi have poached one other’s employees and actively bid against each other for important strategic acquisitions like Twitter.

But today, things might have gotten real, as Facebook has decided to shut Google out of their social network entirely by demanding that Facebook app developers only use in-app advertising from approved vendors. Guess who isn’t approved? Google.

Well, not Google specifically, but their two major properties in Adsense and Double Click, which combine to form basically the largest advertising force on the web. If you are a Facebook app developer and your app is serving up ads from Google, you’ve got until February 28th to change your ways or you’re going to get booted.

GMAIL MOBILE WEB APP GETS PRIORITY INBOX

Those of you suffering from Android envy can put your jealousy aside momentarily, because Priority Inbox is now available via Gmail's mobile web app. Up until now, the mail sorting system was available for the desktop and Android devices only, but now smart email prioritizing is anybody's game. If you didn't already know, Priority Inbox sorts emails in order of importance by learning from your actions, like how many times you read or reply to messages from a certain address. Mobile web users were always able to dig up those sorted messages with the "Important" label, but now all the good stuff is front and center. The feature is available right now on most HTML5-compatible browsers for devices running Android 1.5 and iOS 3.0 or higher. [Engadget]

ANDROID 2.3 GETTING MUSIC SYNC

Blog GizmoFusion has been sent an image of Android 2.3, Gingerbread, displaying an interesting option, “Sync Music.” The option is visible in the Google Account options, indicating that the Big G may have some type of music synchronization service, that will be linked to your Gmail account, in the works. While it isn’t all that hard to get music files onto an Android handset, the process certainly could use some streamlining — cloud-based services are always a bonus.

GOOGLE'S FREE CALLING THROUGH GMAIL EXTENDED A YEAR

Google announced their free calling through Gmail in the US and Canada will be extended for another year. The free calling promotion was set expire at the end of this year, however ”In the spirit of holiday giving and to help people keep in touch in the new year,” Google will add another year to the promotion.

The promotion applies to all calls made from within Gmail, and is completely separate from Google Voice, which also affords free calling to the U.S. and Canada. Gmail’s recently added voice calling feature is thought to be a prelude to the eventual addition of VoIP services to Google Voice. [BGR]

GMAIL CREATOR SAYS CHROME OS UNNECESSARY

Former Google employee, Gmail creator, and FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit has come out and said what a lot of people have been whispering....Chrome OS is not necessary and will be merged with Android. On his FriendFeed page Buchheit said:

Prediction: Chrome OS will be killed next year (or “merged” with Android).

I was thinking, “is this too obvious to even state?”, but then I see people taking Chrome OS seriously, and Google is even shipping devices for some reason.

Chrome OS has no purpose that isn’t better served by Android (perhaps with a few mods to support a non-touch display).

What will differentiate the two, especially when the tablet-optimized Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) launches in early 2011? Does Google have some grand scheme that is not obvious to the rest of the world or have they stuck their thumbs in too many pies in their quest for world domination? [TechCrunch]

CALL RECORDING AVAILABLE IN GOOGLE'S GMAIL

TechCrunch is reporting that some users have begun to see a new “record” button show up in Gmail’s call window. The feature has been available to Google Voice users for quite some time by hitting the number “4″ on your phone’s dial-pad after receiving an inbound call. After activating call recording, both parties are notified that the conversation is being recorded with a verbal queue. Google has yet to publish a press release announcing the feature or detailing when it will be rolled out to all users. [BGR]

FACEBOOK'S GMAIL KILLER COMING MONDAY

Project Titan a Facebook web-based email client that we hear is unofficially referred to internally as its “Gmail killer”. Now we’ve heard from sources that this is indeed what’s coming on Monday during Facebook’s special event, alongside personal @facebook.com email addresses for users.

this is more than just a UI refresh for Facebook’s existing messaging service with POP access tacked on. Rather, Facebook is building a full-fledged webmail client, and while it may only be in early stages come its launch Monday, there’s a huge amount of potential here.

Facebook has the world’s most popular photos product, the most popular events product, and soon will have a very popular local deals product as well. It can tweak the design of its webmail client to display content from each of these in a seamless fashion (and don’t forget messages from games, or payments via Facebook Credits). And there’s also the social element: Facebook knows who your friends are and how closely you’re connected to them; it can probably do a pretty good job figuring out which personal emails you want to read most and prioritize them accordingly. [TechCrunch]

GMAIL ANDROID APP UPDATED

Google has updated it's Gmail Android app.  The update includes message actions that stick to the top of the screen when scrolling, easier to view more messages and limited Priority Inbox support.  The update is available from the Android Market for those running Android 2.2.

GMAIL GETS PRIORITY INBOX FEATURE

Over the next week or so, Google will roll out Priority Inbox to all Gmail users.  Priority Inbox will evaluate how often you read email from the sender, respond to the email, etc. to help organize your inbox.  In theory this should keep your most emails up top and the lower priority emails to the bottom.

Google blog has a nice 2 minute video describing this new service.