Google has announced a new feature in Gmail called People Widget and will begin to roll out the new feature sometime next week. People Widget is a sidebar widget placed at the right of email messages that provides information about the people you’re interacting with in Gmail.

Rapportive, a browser addon, that provides information about the sender of the email. Rapportive includes social data from sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Following the same path, Google introduced People Widget, but without having to install an addon. Unlike Rapportive, People Widget is only limited to Google services like Google Buzz, Google Docs and Google Calendar. You can also chat with individuals, start a group chat or schedule a meeting with groups of people.

Rapportive and People Widget offer similar functionality, but the difference is that People Widget does not include social media information and you don’t have to install a new plugin (Information will just start appearing for Gmail users over the next couple of weeks)

Today seemed like just another day. Little did I know, in a span of about 20 minutes, the resulting set of events would be hugely embarrassing for me. I had barely woken up, when my phone started going bonkers with notifications coming from emails, chats & twitter replies. A glance at the notifications indicated that my email account had been compromised and phishing emails had been sent to every one in my contacts list.

The Analysis

I logged into my Google Apps email account and had a look at the recent account activity details, nothing out of the ordinary there.

Checking the sent mail folder indicated that no emails had been sent in the recent past. It occurred to me to check my other Gmail account.

And indeed, soon as I logged in to my Gmail account, there was a huge red mark indicating activity from China.

Sure enough, the Sent folder had a copy of the spam mail

So, what went wrong? It all boils down to a culmination of the PlayStation Network hacking,  some bad habits from my yesteryear and some nice features from Gmail which resulted in the phishing email to look like it came from my current domain account instead of the old Gmail account.  Let’s have a look at each vector:

1. PlayStation Network break-in
2. Not monitoring my email account
3. Password Reuse
4. Send mail as and Reply-to set to my domain address

PlayStation Network break-in

PlayStation network was hacked recently, with all 77 million accounts compromised as a result of this break-in. I firmly believe this is the primary reason behind my  email account being compromised. The fact that my email account was accessed from a China IP barely 2 days after the break-in before sending off the mails is proof enough to convince me that the user information was sold off to spammers in China.

Not monitoring my email account

Before switching over to my Google Apps account, I had been using this Gmail account. Once the Google Apps account had been setup, I migrated all my contacts and mail over to my Google Apps account. Furthermore I had also used Google Apps’s Auto Forwarding to ensure that any stray email to the old id would get fetched and forwarded automatically to my new account. This resulted in me never monitoring the account. If I had monitored the account, I would have noticed the big red mark under Gmail’s unusual activity and would have changed the password right then.

Password reuse

You’ve heard this before lots of times, and probably are guilty of it – password reuse refers to using the common password across most/all of web services that you use. What starts as convenience turns out to be a single point of failure – just access to this one password is enough for spammers / hackers to gain access to all your accounts.  In my case even though password reuse is something I had kicked out quite some time ago ( thanks to LastPass), back then when I had setup my accounts – I had used the same password for Gmail & PSN. With spammers getting access to my password with the PSN break-in and my failure in having used the same password – getting access to my account was easy.

Send mail as and Reply-to set to my domain address

Gmail has this nice “Send mail as” feature – basically it allows you to send email originating from one Gmail account to appear as originating from another Gmail account(that you have access to, of course). I had used this feature, along with Reply-to set to my current email address during my stages of migration from Gmail to Google Apps. Post migration, however I let these settings remain as-is and did not change them.

End result of all of these:

• My Gmail account was broken in
• All the contacts in my contact list were spammed with phishing email
• To make this worse, they appeared to have originated from my domain account, instead of the dormant Gmail account.

So, what happened then?

As I had mentioned above, soon as the email was sent, I received numerous emails, IMs, and twitter replies about phishing mail being sent from my account. I used the steps outlined by Keith in his earlier post about how to handle a situation like this. I changed the password on my prior Gmail account immediately(mind you: my previous password was not a dictionary password – and neither was it easy to guess or brute force). I sent an apology email to the unintended  recipients  of the phishing mail. (Un)fortunately, Gmail had already marked mails coming from that account as suspicious and that my account might have been compromised so I had to reply to some people mentioning that the second email was a genuine one from me.

Learnings from this event

As a Super User, I take pride (and great pains as well) in knowing and trying to ensure that accounts were never compromised. Today’s account has been a huge embarrassment – and a learning experience for me. To summarize:

• The ghost of your past bad practices will return!
• Never, ever let any account, especially as critical as email – even if it dormant – go unmonitored. If you aren’t using it, close it or delete it.
• On event of any service break-in – always change the password!
• Don’t use the same password for each service

Need for Speed is easily the most recognized racing game franchise in the entire world. That is because mostly all games in the franchise fulfill the insane craving of adrenaline junkies the need for speed, per se with great visuals, astounding locations, thumping audio tracks ,and of course, the super fast cars that you take out for races.

Need for Speed The Run will take players on yet another action-filled joyride through different locales where players flirt with danger at 200 miles per hour. While there are no substantial screenshots or details of the game as yet, it looks like the game will deliver what it usually delivers fast cars.

Executive Producer at Electronic Arts, the publisher of The Run, Jason DeLong commented that we think that Need for Speed The Run is going to surprise people with its intense, thrilling story and big action feel. But the game would be nothing without hot cars and crazy-fast chases.

The game is being developed under the cutting edge new engine from DICE (the developers of Battlefield 2, Mirror’s Edge and other fantastic games) called Frostbite 2. The visuals and feel of the game is bound to be more immersive and gorgeous than any of the previous Need for Speed games. Not only that, apparently the game will also take immersive storytelling to a new level with cutting edge performances that will draw the player into a world with no speed limits, rules or allies.

Well, you are excited, are you not?

Great … not again, this forum has sent me two dozen messages in the last 6 hours since I signed up, I just wonder how many will pile up till next morning

People get a lot of email every single day. And guess what, most of these messages go to Trashwithout any second thought. You use custom labels, filters, priority inbox, nested labels and other ways to organize your Gmail inbox but there are two major problems with Email filtering and categorizing them in proper order.

First, there is no automatic categorization of bulk emails (those which are not junk, of course). The ones you receive from forums, Google Groups, newsletters and other news groups. They land to your inbox and creating a filter or editing existing filters for each and every source is just impossible. The second problem is that you don’t want to mark these notification emails as Spam; instead you need a better way to categorize bulk emails, an autopilot mode is just what saves the day.

The good news is that Gmail has just introduced another neat feature in Gmail Labs called Smart Labels. Smart labels performs an automatic categorization of incoming emails and labels them as either Bulk, Notificationor Forum. There are no settings to tweak, no need to specify the source addresses in your existing filters; all you have to do is activate the feature from Gmail labs and you’re good to go.

As soon as the labs feature is on, you will notice that three new labels have been created and listed on top of your existing Gmail labels. The image on the right is an example of my Gmail inbox.

I must say Smart Labels is quite intelligent, all notification emails e.g messages from Facebook groups, Paypal billing, invoice payments, shipping orders from Checkout sites like TinyDeal goes to the Notificationsfolder. These messages are not spam but they are skipped from the inbox the moment they arrive, saving you precious amount of time.

Messages that have been sent to a large number of people goes to the Bulkfolder. Typical examples are offers, newsletters, subscriptions and of course those so called funnyemails when your colleague thought that embedding 40 pictures of Mickey mouse is really cool.

You can however replace your existing filters with Smart labels or keep both of them, Smart labels doesn’t gets in the way of your current order of categorizing and filtering incoming messages. Should you want to avoid specific emails being smart labelled, edit the required filter from Settings > Filtersand choose a proper category of your choice.

Overall, Smart labels takes the heck out of notifications, payment reminders, subscriptions, newsletters and other formalmessages that arrive your inbox every single day. As I said earlier, there is no setting to tweak and nothing to configure at all, set it On and forget. Do give this a try and let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Gmail’s undo send feature is a lifesaver. Once you have activated the undo send option from Gmail settings, you can cancel sending an accidentally sent email after hitting the “Send” button.This is useful when you realize that you have accidentally sent the email to a wrong person or you should add some more information to the message that has already been sent.

Recently, the Google developers increased the Undo send limit to 30 seconds which is even more useful for slow movers like me. But such is not the case with Gmail contacts, you are not able to restore an accidentally deleted email address from Gmail’s contact manager. Either you have to manually add the contacts or you have to delete everything and start from scratch,   provided you have a back up copy of your Gmail contact list saved elsewhere.

Good news, the Google developers have just added a new option under Gmail contacts which lets you restore your Gmail contact list to an earlier time.

To get started, log in to your Gmail account, click “Contacts” from the left pane and choose the “More actions” drop down menu. Then select the “Restore contacts” option as shown below:

This will open a small browser overlay window where you can define the time when you want the contact list to be rolled back. The general options include restoring the contacts to 1 week, yesterday, 1 hour and 10 minutes. However, if you feel you had accidentally deleted someone a couple of weeks ago, choose the “Custom option” and enter a date of your choice.

Hitting the “restore” button works like a charm, the previous state of the contact list is restored automatically. Works exactly the same way as “System Restore” in windows, it’s just the fact that you can’t define an auto backup option for contact list within Gmail settings. Handy !

Last month, we reported that Gmail was being unbearably slow for a small subset of users. The problem came to our notice after Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of Duck Duck Go, complained about Gmail’s sluggishness.

It seems that Gmail problems are raring their ugly head once again. One of our commenters pointed out that Gmail has been practically inaccessible to some users for the past three days. According to this thread on Google’s official support forum, Gmail perpetually displays the “loading” prompt and fails to open any mail. Here is a typical description of the problem offered by changk05:

Also for me started after July 4th weekend. The problem remains despite 4 different computers with different versions of IE, and a mac as well. Installing Chrome did not work. Can’t open messages. Can’t forward messages from list view. Can’t get into settings. Please fix.

Although most of the affected users started encountering these problems after the 4rth July weekend, some users have been experiencing difficulties for more than a week. Let’s hope that Google will fix the issue for everyone, and having a famous blog is not a per-requisite for getting support from Google.

Update: Google has finally responded to the mounting complaints. Here is the response offered by a Google employee:

I am sorry that you are all experiencing this issue. We are working very hard to solve the problem, and I will update you as soon as I can.

While some of the workarounds do not work for everyone, they are worthwhile troubleshooting steps. If you have not yet tried any of the following workarounds, I suggest giving them a try.

1. Clear your cache and cookies (you can find instructions on how to do this in the referenced article)
2. Use the basic HTML version of Gmail by clicking on the link at the bottom of Gmail
3. Use another browser.
If these do not help fix your problem, you can try some of the other suggestions in this thread. In the meantime, please know that we are continuing to work towards solving this issue.

We have also posted this problem on our Known Issues page, where you can report that you are experiencing the issue.

When Gmail burst onto the scene, it garnered universal acclaim for its speed. Over the years, Gmail has continued growing and innovating. However, this growth seems to have come at a cost.

If Gmail is agonizingly slow for you, you aren’t the only one. In the words of Gabriel Weinberg, founder of Duck Duck Go, “It can take 20sec to switch labels, and even longer to search for something. But here’s the worst part–it takes just as long to send a simple message!?!”.

Fortunately for Weinberg, his blog post got noticed by a Googler. Not only did Google fix his problem, but also acknowledged that several other users may be affected by the same issue. Here is a snippet from Google’s response:

The team is still looking into your account slowness, but it initially appears that the problem is isolated to a small subset of Gmail users…They are still investigating the root cause of the slowness but in the meantime have moved your account to a different set of servers, which should help.

This isn’t the first time that Google has acknowledged this problem. Google had admitted that Gmail was sluggish and had promised to fix it back in March. While it’s nice that they reached out to Weinberg, one has to wonder what is taking Google so long. Meanwhile, if you are experiencing sluggishness, you can try some measures like deleting data from Gmail (email, labels, contacts etc.) and disabling Gmail Labs.

Gmail filters are great – you can use them for a variety of tasks. From moving selected conversations to specific labels to auto archiving replies – Gmail filters and the auto forwarding feature makes life easy, in case you get dozens of emails every hour.

Gmail has added a security layer in the auto forwarding email procedure. When you try to add a new email address where you want to forward emails from your existing Gmail account, Gmail requires you to first verify that email address.

To add a new email address for auto forwarding email, go to Settings> Forwarding and POP/IMAP.

Once you have added an email address, you are shown the following message:

Gmail sends a confirmatory link to that email address along with a verification code. You will have to click the confirmation link or enter the verification code to complete the auto forwarding set up procedure. Here is how the confirmatory email looks like:

However, if you are using Google Apps premier or Google Apps education edition, you   do not have to verify the forwarding email addresses. Regular Google apps users are an exception though. More information on Gmail forwarding can be found here.

A few days back, Gmail added the functionality to drag and drop attachments from desktop in an email message. It works quite simple – drag the file(s) you want to attach and drop it in the attachment pane of Gmail. The file is instantly uploaded and attached to your email message. This has proved to be a useful feature, you no longer have to hit the old browse button, navigate to the location of the file and then click “Upload”.

Now Gmail has added another cool feature – you can attach images in the email message body by a simple drag and drop from your desktop, or from any other folder in your computer.

Suppose you have a bunch of images which you want to attach to an email message. Instead of clicking the “image upload” button and uploading each file one by one, you can select all the image files and drag them in the message body as shown below:

All the images will be uploaded one by one and when the upload is complete, you can align or resize the images as per your requirements. So simple, yet so useful.

As of now, this new feature is only available for Google Chrome but Gmail will soon implement it on other browsers as well. [ via Gmail blog ]

Gmail has added support for HTML 5, which means now you can drag and drop to attach a file in any email message. This is useful, when you have to attach a lot of files kept on a single folder. You don’t have to click the browse button again and again and can attach a bunch of files together in one go.

When you drag the files in the compose message window, Gmail shows an attachment pane to drop the files:

Earlier I used Picture paste to add images, attachments and other files in Gmail messages from the desktop. The drag and drop feature was much desired, because often the flash uploader would freeze in the middle of a file upload and you have to start the upload all over from scratch. When you want to attach a bunch of files or images – open the folder containing your files, select all files by pressing “Control +A” and drag all of them in the Gmail compose window. As simple as that.

If you want to attach an image from a web URL, simply drag the image from the web page to the Gmail message compose window. Please note that this feature works in browsers that support HTML 5 (Firefox 3.6+ or Google Chrome 4+). [ via Gmail blog ]