If there’s one thing you use your BlackBerry for, it’s games, right?

In response to the recent BlackBerry service outage, which left millions of users across the world with a completely useless device, RIM has apologized for the disruption and is attempting to win some confidence back. In a Press Release issued early this morning, Research in Motion announced they will be offering premium apps  to customers as an expression of appreciation. The short list of apps and games will be available later this week, and will stay “free” until the end of 2011. It’s about as free as the $40/month you pay your carrier for access to RIM’s proprietary backhaul.

Likely, you have a BlackBerry for enterprise use (because it’ll cost the company too much to drop the antiquated service), well RIM isn’t ignoring you either. Corporate enterprise customers will receive one month of free technical support. A whole 30 days of technical service tacked onto your existing ball-and-chain contract with RIM — free!

The complete selection of premium apps will become available to download at BlackBerry App World over a period of four weeks beginning Wednesday, October 19th.   The selections over this period will include the following (with more to come):

•  SIMS 3 – Electronic Arts
•  Bejeweled – Electronic Arts
•  N.O.V.A. – Gameloft
•  Texas Hold’em Poker 2 – Gameloft
•  Bubble Bash 2 – Gameloft
•  Photo Editor Ultimate – Ice Cold Apps
•  DriveSafe.ly Pro – iSpeech.org
•  iSpeech Translator Pro – iSpeech.org
•  Drive Safe.ly Enterprise – iSpeech.org
•  Nobex Radioâ„¢ Premium – Nobex
•  Shazam Encore – Shazam
•  Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant – Vlingo

RIM’s enterprise customers will also be offered one month of free Technical Support.   Current customers will be offered a complimentary one month extension of their existing Technical Support contract, and customers who do not currently have a Technical Support contract will be offered a one month trial of RIM’s BlackBerry Technical Support Services – Enhanced Support, free of charge.   Additional details about the program and information about how to register will be available at  www.blackberry.com/enterpriseoffer.

It’s a pretty unclear message that RIM is sending. “Our service was down for 3 days and you were left with a brick in your pocket, here are some free games to play (for when the service goes out again), and if you pay for the service, we’ll offer your free technical support (to tell you when the service goes out again)“.

It should also be noted that of the 12 listed apps that RIM will be offering customers, most of them  require  an active data connection to be of any use. You can’t use Shazam, Nobex Radio or the iSpeech applications without service.

So be sure to fire up AppWorld on your BlackBerry and grab those games before the service goes down again, we all know you can’t survive with BrickBreaker for another 3 days.

Gmail is definitely one of the best email providers out there and they have always been innovating and adding new features. We have written several Gmail Tips and Gmail Labs features in the past, however, a new feature is being rolled out to users where they are being warned about filters that forward emails to other email addresses.

Gmail has always been keen on increasing the security of their service after what happened in China. They have been adding features which displays the locations you logged into Gmail from and also alerts you about suspicious logins. Additionally, Google has also added features like forced SSL and two step validation process.

The new alerts about forwarding filters is really useful and will allow users to see if anyone is forwarding emails to other accounts. In fact, I was very keen on having this feature for Gmail and had even spoken to few developers on creating an extension for Gmail, however, Google beat me at it.

The new message will be displayed on the top of the page as seen in the screenshot above and will allow users to review settings and change them if required. Currently, the "Review Settings" link takes you to the Filters page, however, I would have loved to have Gmail only display those filters which are forwarding emails to other accounts when I click on it.

A Google help page is also setup to tell users about this new feature, it states;

Why do I have a forwarding filter notice?

You’re seeing a notice to help you confirm that the forwarding filter setting that’s active on your account is accurate. If your account has this feature enabled, you should see this notice.

Forwarding filters are a pretty powerful feature that enables you to send a specific portion of your incoming email to another email account. This mechanism is helpful especially when you have more than one email account. Even so, it’s a good idea to make sure all the details are consistent with what you intend and expect. We encourage you to review your settings and verify that they are accurate.

How long will I see this notice?

For about a week, this notice will appear for a few minutes each time you sign in to your account. Displaying the notification in this way helps ensure that you have a chance to see the notice, rather than someone who might try to gain unauthorized access to your account and use this setting improperly. The notice will disappear immediately if you choose to disable the forwarding filter setting, but that decision is up to you.

How do I remove unwanted forwarding filters?

If the content of the notice looks unneeded or unfamiliar, please do the following:

1. If you see unfamiliar account access, please change your password immediately. This may indicate that someone has unauthorized access to your account. It’s a good idea to pick a strong password for your Gmail account and never use it again on other websites.
2. Sign back in to your Gmail account and click the gear icon in the top right corner of Gmail and choose Mail settings.
3. Click the Filters tab.
4. Search for the terms "Forward to" and delete any filters with unfamiliar email addresses. Note, there may be more than one filter.
5. Click the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
6. In the "Forwarding" section, click the first drop-down menu and remove any unfamiliar email addresses.
7. Select the Disable forwarding radio button if you want to disable non-filter based forwarding.

Kudos to Gmail on adding this feature, I have always wanted it and would have created it myself. It will definitely help people to keep a quick eye on Forwarding filters and remove them if necessary.

Hotmail, world’s largest free email service with 360 million unique users per month, completed 15 years on July 4, 2011. It was one of the first web-based email services on the internet.

Hotmail was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, two colleagues at FirePower Systems Inc. in Silicon Valley. The service was commercially launched on July 4,  1996 as HoTMaiL; the selective capitalization referring to HTML. The launch date has a bit of trivia attached to it. July 4 is American Independence Day, and the service symbolized freedom from ISP-based email and the ability to access a user’s inbox from anywhere in the world.

Interestingly, the Hotmail development and operations groups are based in Mountain View, California and not in Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond. When Hotmail Corporation was an independent company, its headquarters were in Sunnyvale, California.

Acquisition

An Estonian investor acquired Hotmail from the original creators and continued developing it. In 1997, Microsoft acquired Hotmail for an estimated $400 million to make free email a feature of Microsoft Network (MSN). The Hotmail acquisition by Microsoft turned up the heat on the then online giant America Online, MSN’s main rival.

Shortly after the acquisition, Microsoft rebranded it to MSN Hotmail. Also, Hotmail was integrated with another Microsoft acquisition, Jump, a web-based calendar service.

In 2005, a refresh of Hotmail was announced as Windows Live Hotmail (codename Kahuna), and was rolled out in 2007. Windows Live is a suite of online services and products from Microsoft.

Growth

Hotmail quickly gained in popularity as it was localized for different markets around the globe and became the world’s largest webmail service. In its current version, Windows Live Hotmail is available in 36 different languages. According to last year’s comScore ranking, Windows Live Hotmail is the world’s largest web-based email service with nearly 364 million users. Second and third are Yahoo! Mail at 280 million users and Gmail at 191 million users.

Evolution

Hotmail initially ran under Solaris for mail services and Apache on FreeBSD for web services. Although a project was started to migrate Hotmail to Windows 2000,   Microsoft admitted that DNS functions of the Hotmail system were still reliant on FreeBSD. After a while, MSN Hotmail was tied to Microsoft Passport, Microsoft’s web authentication scheme. Microsoft Passport has now been rebranded to Windows Live ID.

Starting in 2004, the Hotmail engineering team completely rewrote the backend system to move it to a system that uses  Windows Server and Windows SQL Server. In 2005, the Hotmail engineering team undertook a similar rewrite of the frontend system, and rebuilt both Hotmail and Calendar from the ground up using C# and ASP.net and leveraged Windows Server and the latest version of IIS.  The old software was written in C++ and Perl.

Although, Hotmail was ahead of its time in offering and progressively adding email features like anti-virus scanning for attachments, integrated calendar service, built-in reading pane, email rules, and spell checking, there was a period of technological stagnation in the first half of 2000s. Leading webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo worked on gaining more users rather than innovating in the space in this period.

The advent of Gmail in 2004 as a revolutionary webmail service spurred a wave of innovation amongst webmail services. Hotmail too made dramatic changes featuring greater storage, speed, and interface flexibility. Hotmail initially offered 2MB free storage while today it offers ever-growing storage.  The service has since  been growing at an astounding pace both in innovation and engineering as well as in user base.

Back in 2008, Gmail had introduced a new feature which allowed you to track suspicious access to your account. This feature was gradually made more prominent in 2010 through Google Suspicious Login Protection. Google has in fact taken this protection further with the introduction of two-step login verification thanks to Gmail accounts in China being hacked and several other security measures they have put in place.

However, your Gmail account can get hacked nevertheless (Read: How to find if your Gmail account is hacked and what to do) and there is nothing you can do about it. But what if your friends email account gets hacked and you receive a desperate email from them asking for cash or some help?

Well, this is not unusual and there are several times when you might receive emails from your contacts which come from a legitimate email address asking you for financial help. These messages "might" be genuine but many a times these are nothing but online scams. Thankfully, you can avoid such scams if your friend is using a Gmail or Google Apps related email address. How? Well, thanks to several security measures, Gmail now display a suspicious email warning if they believe that the account has been hijacked.

Take for example an email from my friend who is on my contact list. The above screenshot displays a warning saying that the message might be suspicious (and it is indeed because my friends account was compromised). This is definitely a good feature because it will allow users to instantly know that something is wrong. Based on this message (and the content of the email), I alerted my friend and he confirmed that his account was compromised.

I am not sure if Gmail does this for emails from non-Gmail accounts, but it is definitely helpful when a email service is intelligent enough to know when an account has been hijacked. This information might be collected using several security measures, one of them might be the suspicious account login feature Gmail has. However, it might not just be limited to it.

As if the various Osama Bin Laden video scams on Facebook were not enough, a new malware is being spread through emails now. If you receive any emails with an attachment named Fotos_Osama_Bin_Laden.zip or something similar, DO NOT OPEN IT.

According to F-Secure Labs, an email is doing the rounds of the internet with an attachment named Fotos_Osama_Bin_Laden.zip, this could be named differently too as Photos_Osama_Bin_Laden.zip. The file contains an executable named Fotos_Osama_Bin_Laden.exe.

The executable does not contain any photos of Osama Bin Laden but is infected with the Trojan-Downloader:W32/Banload.BKHJ, which is a banking Trojan. It installs on the system and will start to monitor your online banking sessions via a Browse Helper Object (BHO) and try to redirect your payments to wrong accounts.

If you have downloaded or clicked on the attachment run an free online scanner or a anti-malware after disabling access to the internet. You might also want to run scans using your Antivirus. If you don’t have one, head over to our Free Antivirus section to find one.

The new Trojan is playing on human curiosity generated by the death of Osama Bin Laden. There are actually no leaked photos or videos of the event. As an advice, please don’t click on any links which tell you that you can watch a censored video or pictures of Osama Bin Laden’s death.

You will not be able to watch any videos or pictures unless the US government releases them. So hold your horses until then and don’t spread the virus of become affected by it.

Gmail has continued innovation this year with the launch of Smart Labels. Another new nifty feature has come to Gmail that allows us to send emails in the background, without blocking the user interface while sending it.

The new feature here is called Background Send and it does exactly what it sounds like. With Background Send, you can click on send and expect to move around your mailbox seamlessly. This will not be interrupted by the sending process, that is taking place in the background. Clearly, you can send multiple emails in parallel without any of them being interrupted.

The feature will require browsers with fast and fail-proof JavaScript rendering. As the feature works in th background and the process of sending an email is not as intensive and simultaneously frequent as, say tweeting, the performance/speed difference will not be evident at first.

How to Enable Background Send in Gmail?

To enable background send, go to Gmail -> Settings -> Mail Settings on the top right hand corner. Out there, go to the Labs tab and look for  Background Send. Click on the Enable radio and you are all set to use Background Send.

Gmail has taken over all our email needs, and innovations like these are extremely important to keep competition at bay.

Unknown to many, Opera Software has its own webmail offering called OperaMail (not to be confused with Opera’s inbuilt email client). Last year, Opera Software had acquired Fastmail, in an attempt to beef up its webmail offering. The newest generation of Web users will discover the Web through a mobile device. Having world-class messaging capability alongside a rich and compelling Web experience is essential. By combining forces, Opera and FastMail.fm can offer messaging on any device. This will enhance the value Opera provides to consumers, while assisting our operator partners in reducing customer churn, Rolf Assev, Opera’s Chief Strategy Officer had explained.

The integration of Fastmail with OperaMail took longer than expected (due to legal issues?), but it’s finally over. Opera Mail now uses the Fastmail backend, and all users should be able to login with their existing username and password. Existing users might notice missing emails; however, any missing mail will be forwarded to their new account soon. Unfortunately, some users were caught unawares by the switch, due to inexplicable lack of advance communication. Surely, Opera Software can be expected to be a bit more responsible, since they are dealing with something as critical as email.

Opera is also working on launching a brand new email service, which will be integrated with myOpera. “We will soon unveil a brand new webmail service where you will be using your existing My Opera username and password to log in”, teased Opera’s Haavard Moen.

Last July, I purchased my first ever Android phone the Galaxy S. Since then, I have shifted from one Android phone to another after every few months. My Android based smartphone had become a very integral part of my life. I need it for tweeting and checking mails on the move, trying out new apps etc.

I never thought how my life would be without my Android phone. Then one fine morning the microphone on my Desire Z stopped working. I had to give it to the service center for a replacement. HTC promised me that I will get a replacement phone within a week, but it was only after 15 days and tons of phone calls that I got a replacement phone.

Nevertheless, when I gave my Desire Z to the service center, I was totally devastated! I had no idea how I was going to spend the upcoming days without my beloved Android handset. Since I did not have any spare Android handset with me, I had to use a Nokia 6681 for the time being. I had all my contacts backed up to Google Contacts, and the 6681 had no option of syncing with it. The only option I was left was with, was to save some important numbers in the phonebook of the handset.

For the next week, what I went through without my beloved Zee phone was nothing short of torture. More than the phone’ itself, I was missing apps like Remote For iTunes, TweetDeck, My Tracks, Google Maps and RunKeeper which I use on a day-to-day basis. The thing I missed the most? Push email and calendar entries reminder!

The basic and the most important feature of a phone, the calling part, was something which I did not miss at all. The Nokia 6681 was as good as the Z in network reception and the call quality was above average as well. I do understand that the Nokia 6681 is a smartphone’ in its own right, and I could have simply pimped the phone to make my life a little less miserable.

However, after using phones with speedy 1 GHz processor and tons of RAM, the 6681 felt downright slow! I felt pity on the poor soul, and decided against pimping it for my needs.

All this just proves that with time we, the users, have started expecting much more from our smartphones, than just fulfilling our basic telephony and messaging needs. We need a small device in our hands that can help us find our way through unknown roads, let us know what our friends are having for breakfast, make our day-to-day life much better, and in the end help us to connect to our near and dear ones via phone calls and SMS’s.

Update: Statement from Google at bottom of the post

If you logged into Gmail and are missing some emails and contacts in it, don’t panic, your account is not hacked. The missing emails and contacts issues is actually Google’s fault and they are currently working on fixing the issue.

According to reports from Huffington Post and The Next Web, Gmail users have been reporting about deleted emails and contacts from their Gmail accounts. The issue seems to be widespread with users reporting it on forums.

According to some reports, over 500,000 users have been affected with this problem and several more users are currently seeing the same. Google has been working on the issues since the past 3 hours and have posted updates on their app status dashboard. The first message was posted at around 3PM Eastern time with the latest message being posted at 5:44 PM Eastern with no fix in place.

5:44 PM

Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by February 27, 2011 7:44:00 PM UTC-5 with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience.

For those Gmail users reporting missing messages, our engineers are working to restore them as soon as possible.

4:20 PM

Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by February 27, 2011 5:20:00 PM UTC-5 with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience.

This issue affects less than .29% of the Google Mail userbase.

3:09 PM

We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail. We will provide more information shortly.

Gmail is currently one of the largest email providers in the world and this is not the first time they have faced an issue. However, Gmail has not been alone as recently there were similar problems with Hotmail too where users suddenly lost their email messages.

Currently Google says that they will provide further updates in the next two hours on whether or not this problem is fixed. So if you are missing some emails or contacts, please wait until the next Google update is available. We have contacted Google for a statement about this issue and will update once we have more information.

(Image Credit unknown, please let us know if you own this image and we will credit you duly)

Update: Google spokesperson Jessica Kositz responded and here is the statement from Google:

Today a very small number users are having difficulty accessing their Gmail accounts, and in some cases once they’re in, trouble viewing emails. This is affecting less than .08% of our Gmail user base, and we’ve already fixed the problem for some individuals. Our engineers are working as quickly as possible and we hope to have everything back to normal soon. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience to our customers.

Update 2: Google just responded back with more updates

We now have a better understanding of the impact of this issue, and we have lowered our estimate of the number of affected Gmail users from 0.08% to 0.02%. We have restored access for a third of those affected. The remaining 0.013% of accounts are being restored on an ongoing basis, and we expect the issue to be resolved for everyone within 12 hours. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience caused.

The stalemate between RIM and the Indian authorities finally seems to have ended. Research in Motion stated that it has provided solutions to Indian security agencies which will allow them to access data sent using Blackberry Messenger services.

The Indian Government had asked RIM to provide it access to Blackberry Email and Messenger services by January 31, 2011. While it has given the security agencies access to Blackberry Messenger data, it still hasn’t given them access to the Blackberry Enterprise Server.

“RIM continues to work closely with the government and RIM’s carrier partners in India…We are pleased to have delivered a solution well before a mutually agreed milestone date of January 31, 2011.”

“No changes can be made to the security architecture for BlackBerry Enterprise Server customers since, contrary to any rumors, the security architecture is the same around the world and RIM truly has no ability to provide its customers’ encryption keys” said the RIM update.

Even Nokia set up its Mail and Messaging servers in India recently, to allow law enforcement agencies to intercept email and messenger data.

via WSJ