I have been using Gmail for a few years now and have come to love their spam filtering and security among other things. Gmail was probably one of the first free email provider to allow users to see where they logged in from and also provide an additional security layer with 2-step verification logins.

Some of the most interesting features in Gmail have been the ability to detect suspicious emails from your contacts, ability to alert you whenever any suspicious activity takes place in your account and the feature which alerts you whenever any filters have been setup to forward emails to another account.

However, there is a chance that most of the users do not access their accounts through the web interface and instead prefer using IMAP, notifying such types of accounts is harder. To overcome that problem Gmail has now started sending out emails to users saying that they have detected and prevented a suspicious login from an unknown location.

The email which arrived in my inbox earlier today can be seen in the image above. The message reads:

Keith,

Someone recently tried to use an application to sign in to your Google Account, [redacted]. We prevented the sign-in attempt in case this was a hijacker trying to access your account. Please review the details of the sign-in attempt:

May 8, 2012 8:37am GMT
IP Address: 204.15.240.72
Location: Sunnyvale, California, United States

If you do not recognize this sign-in attempt, someone else might be trying to access your account. You should sign in to your account and reset your password immediately. Find out how at http://support.google.com/accounts?p=reset_pw

If this was you, and you want to give this application access to your account, complete the troubleshooting steps listed at http://support.google.com/mail?p=client_login

Sincerely,
The Google Accounts Team

This email approach from Gmail seems to be new and will allow users who don’t access the web interface to find out if their account is being compromised. It is not clear though whether the user was able to login successfully or not. Nevertheless, you should definitely change your password if you receive it.

If you need help generating strong passwords, you can check out 4 unique apps to generate strong passwords.

Also Read: How to find if your Gmail account is hacked and what to do

Update: For all those asking I had already confirmed that this is a legit email and a Gmail community manager has also confirmed this it is legitimate in a stack exchange thread:

I am the Gmail Community Manager, and I can confirm that we do send email notifications in certain cases such as described here.

Always carefully check the URL and never enter your Google password on a page that is not hosted at google.com. For example, it is OK to enter your password at https://accounts.google.com or https://mail.google.com, but not gooogle.com, g00gle.com, etc.

Update 2: Turns out that Google is now actively blocking login attempts from services like Plaxo and Dropbox. A thread on Dropbox reports similar emails being sent out to users.

Back in 2009, Google launched the automatic message translation tool in Gmail Labs, which enabled you to translate emails that are in foreign language into a desired language that you understand. The auto translation of messages became immensely popular and successful, and thus Google decided to graduate it from Gmail Labs and move into the real world. That is, the feature will now be enabled by default to all users.

Google Translate has always been a very friendly and immensely useful tool. Incorporating the same feature in Gmail is a good move from Google, as many times we do receive email messages that are not in a language we understand.

Unlike the earlier days, we would not be required to copy the text and translate it using either Google Translate or a different translation engine. With the integrated translation, it’s not only easy to translate messages, but also save your time.

This is how the feature works in action -

All you need to do is click on “Translate message” to translate the message in your desired language.

You can as well choose to permanently translate a particular language to your desired language by clicking on “Always translate: [language]” option on the top-right of the message. You can always disable the feature if you’re a bi-lingual and don’t need translations for a language. All you need to do is click on “Turn off for: [language].”

If you have accidentally turned off the message translation feature for a particular language, or don’t see the Translate message header on a message, click on the down arrow next to Reply at the top-right of the message pane and select the Translate message option in the drop-down.

Also Read: Translate Google+ into More Than 50 Languages

In addition to this, Google has also graduated the Smart Mute and Title Tweaks feature from the Gmail Labs. The smart Mute feature is basically used to mute noisy email thread and makes sure that it stays out of your inbox. Click here to know more about muting email threads.

The Title Tweaks feature changes the title in your browser’s tab to tell you that you have new messages. The tab now reads “Inbox (20) – user@example.com – Gmail” instead of “Gmail – Inbox (20) – user@example.com.”

Along with the new features, the Gmail team has retired some older and less popular Lab features in the next few days. Those features include – “Old Snakey, Mail Goggles, Mouse Gestures, Hide Unread Counts, Move Icon Column, Inbox Preview, Custom Date Formats and SMS in Chat gadget. Please note that the SMS in Chat lab is not being retired, just the gadget associated with it.”

Beginning this week, Google is forcing Gmail users to switch to the new interface. While the new interface looks slick and modern, it suffers from numerous poor design choices that have users up in arms. Some of the issues are fixable with a few settings tweaks. For example, you can use the compact, high-contrast theme to reduce the wastage of space and enhance readability. But for others, there is seemingly no cure.

Thankfully, few users are taking up the challenge themselves, and are trying to make the new Gmail more intuitive through extensions and userstyles. Among the better attempts is Gmelius, which is a free, cross-browser compatible extension that tweaks and refines the new Gmail interface.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the stuff that Gmelius does:

• It reclaims space by collapsing the Search and Share bar, stripping away the footer, and removing the People widget. Gmelius can also be configured to block all advertisements.
• It enhances the appearance of Gmail by adding subtle row highlights, and disabling fancy fonts and colors in incoming mails.
• It makes navigation more intuitive by colorizing the navigation icons and supplementing them with text.
• It adds an auto-scroll to the top action that can be triggered by clicking on the black Google bar.

Gmelius is dead simple to configure, and the tweaks it offers go a long way towards enhancing the new Gmail interface. The new navigations icons drove me nuts for weeks, and even after using the new interface for a several months, I still get confused occasionally. I only wish that I had discovered Gmelius sooner. There’s undoubtedly a lot more stuff that Gmelius could do. For example, it could bring back the reply links beneath every message or re-enable color coding of conversations. However, Gmelius already does enough for me to encourage you to go ahead and install it. It’s currently available for Chrome, Firefox & Opera.

[ Download Gmelius ]

Just like the new Facebook timeline, Gmail also recently forced their new theme on users and apparently many people are not happy with this decision. While Gmail earlier provided a simple way to revert back the Gmail interface, that option is no longer available. This has definitely not gone down too well with Gmail users.

So is there any way in which you could revert back to the old Gmail interface? Well, not officially, but you can still do it thanks to a Stylish script.

The Return of Old Gmail Stylish script is one which resembles the “Old Gmail” interface the most. Although the overall interface is not as neat (see screenshot above), it definitely is one of the best options if you despise the new Gmail interface. The script in question reverts back some of the Gmail styles to the older one and also reverts back the top navigation in Gmail.

You will also find several other Stylish scripts for Gmail, however, the one listed here seems to be the best alternative to get back the old Gmail interface. You can also try out several other themes for Gmail by using this Stylish search.

Please note that Firefox users will have to install the Stylish add-on before using the scripts. Google Chrome users can also install the Stylish extension or install the Stylish script as a Greasemonkey script and run it as an extension.

Gmail is considered to be one of the best, if not the best email client on the Web. One of the reasons Gmail became so popular over the years, is due to Google’s strategy to let integrated apps and other services work within it. Gmail is not only integrated with Google services like Docs, Calendar, Chat, Tasks, Search but also with other 3rd party apps that can boost your productivity and make your life easier with daily tasks. In other words Gmail today is not only used is an email client but as a massive Web-platform that can be helpful for managing a lot of other tasks that we would otherwise need several applications to do.

Over the years I’ve been trying to take advantage of Gmail features and apps in order to make my life easier, and I’m still discovering new benefits every day. I’m not going to write about the basic and obvious Gmail advantages and features, but I’m going to describe you 4 apps that I use daily.

1. Boomerang for Gmail

This is an already popular app, reaching 1 million downloads, and lets you do 2 simple things:

a. Schedule your emails. When composing an email, you have the option to schedule your email in order to be sent the day after or a week after or at any date/time of your preference. This is an amazing feature for people like me who are working late or on weekends and don’t want to show the correct date of the emails to their clients. For example, let’s say you need to answer to 10 emails until Monday morning and its Sunday night. There is no way to write these emails within one hour on Monday but neither you would like these emails to be send on Sunday at 22:00. With Boomerang you can start replying to all of your emails on Sunday night, scheduling them to be send on Monday at 9:30 morning which is a normal working hour.

b. Create reminders for emails. Using Boomerang you can assign a reminder to any email at any given time and date. That has several uses, for example you got an email from your partner with your “Website’s progress” monthly report. You might not want to deal with this issue now because you are busy with other stuff, but you want to be reminded to check it in 2 weeks. So you set up a reminder with Boomerang inside the message. You can also use this function for every email you send and which you are expecting a reply. Thus, if you do not receive a reply from a specific email within 2 weeks, Boomerang will remind you about that.

What so cool about it?
It’s cool because you can send emails at 23:00 and let them look like you send them next day morning. It’s also cool because it sends you reminders for important emails you assigned it.

Cost: Limited version Free. $4.99/month for paid unlimited version.

2. Rapportive

Rapportive is a Gmail app that visually is seen at the right column of your Gmail. This app will search the Web and especially Social Networks like Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter, every time you receive an email from someone and will display to you the public information associated with the owner of that email account.  More precisely will look for the owner’s name, photo in Linkedin, work position, Twitter and Facebook and will even display the latest tweets of the person. That can be a great feature for a lot of people that often receive emails from strangers, helping them get useful information.

What’s so cool about it?
You see the faces and important information of unknown people that send you emails.

Cost: Free

3. Yesware

I have discovered Yesware a few weeks ago and I’m really impressed wih it. This app is dedicated to Salespeople and managers, and it can help you track emaila, create templates, organize your sales activity, create reports and even integrate it with few of the most famous CRM systems in the market. Personally, I use only the tracking system and templates. The ability to track your emails will give you the ability to know if and when an email you have sent was opened by the other person. A lot of times we send emails knowing that the email was sent but not knowing if the person on the other site has opened it. With Yesware you will know this instantly. The template feature will also help you maintain standard format emails when replying to similar emails, letting you to change only variable words like the name, price, etc. I believe this app has a lot to offer, and everyone can find different ways using it

What’s so cool about it?
People will not be able lie to you about reading your email or not. With Yesware you know instantly that your email was opened and read.

Cost: Limited version Free. $4.99 for Unlimited use

4. Wisestamp

Wisestamp might not be the most useful app for Gmail, but it will certainly provide you the ability to have the coolest signature. WiseStamp is an app that lets you create a nice looking and powerful signature for your Gmail. By powerful we mean that you have a bunch of choices and apps that you can include inside your signature, creating a powerful and dynamic content signature. A few of the things you can include in your signature with Wisestamp are:
- Social Media. Provide link to your social media presence directly from your signature. (Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest)
- Facebook page. Show the activities of your Facebook page, your status and your updates
- Rss feeds. Automatically display feeds from your Blog inside your signature
- Create VCard Barcode
- Provide links and integrations with Charity and Causes organizations like WWF, Global Giving and more.
- Show dynamic content from other websites like Wikipedia, Quora, Today in History, and Random quotes
- Share your presentations from Slideshare
- Create other social bookmark and social activities

There are a lot of more various apps you can include in your signature using Wisestamp, just visit the App Gallery and you will be amazed.

What’s so cool about it?
You will have a really cool signature and you can drive traffic to your social media accounts, blog or website from your signature

Cost: Limited Version Free. $36/year Pro account

If productivity is important in your life, or if Gmail is the most used application of your day, then you should definitely try the above apps. I’m not a huge fan of apps, since I always look for simplicity and performance in the tools that I use. But if your daily needs and tasks go beyond sending an email, then these apps will definitely make a difference in your productivity and performance.

=== Author Bio ====
Pantelis Vladimirou is the co-founder of Webarts Limited, a creative Digital agency, providing Cyprus SEO, Web Design, Social Media and other Internet Marketing services

I am not a big fan of IM programs and hence do not use desktop chat clients e.g Google Talk, Pidgin, Digsby or Meebo. The built in chat feature of Gmail is perfectly suitable for brief conversations but there is a small catch. During a chat conversation, you have to either stick to the Gmail tab forever or constantly oscillate between multiple tabs, which can be highly annoying at times. I am composing a blog post and here comes my friend whom I can’t ignore, I switch to the Gmail tab, send a message, fall back to the earlier tab and in comes the ding!

This cycle goes on and I have to find the Gmail tab within a sea of open browser tabs; there seems to be no possible way to get out of this situation other than sticking to the Gmail tab through the entire conversation.

If you are anything like me and want to detach Gmail chat from the browser, try this chat for Google chrome extension. This extension frees Gmail chat from Google Chrome, allowing you to reply to messages from no matter what web page you’re on at any given moment. The extension works exactly the same as the desktop Gmail client, with added support for email, video calling and Google Plus hangouts.

Once you have installed the extension, sign in to your Gmail account and you are through. Here is how the chat UI of the extension looks like:

To start a voice call or a Google Plus hangout, all you have to do is hit the respective icons on the chat window. One of the biggest advantage is the ability to send quick emails to your Gmail contacts, right from the desktop, without having to open Gmail at all. Type the name of the contact in the search pane, hit the result, compose your email and shoot! No more inbox gazing every 30 minutes.

The extension is slightly slow and IM’s might take a little longer to go through. Another downside is that it doesn’t support multiple user profiles or multiple Gmail accounts, so if you are using a shared computer, you better use the standalone desktop chat client. [via]

Also read: Ultimate list of tips and tricks for Google Chrome

Microsoft doesn’t own the patent on all things pretty! If you’re a Gmail user, there are lots of options available to you. Today, I would like to show you how you can add a professional looking signature to your Gmail messages.

In Gmail, look to the far right side of the page and you will see an icon that looks like a cog. You can see this picture below. If you click this cog, you will get a dropdown menu where you will need to select “settings”.

In Gmail settings find the “General” tab, highlighted below, and click the radio button below “No signature” to turn on the signature feature.

Proceed to type in the white box the information that you would like to include in your signature. Notice above the white box that you have a toolbar with a lot of formatting options such as bold, italicize, and underline. Pictured below, you can see that I have highlighted my name selected the “Change Font” button to select a different font.

If you want to add a link to your website just click the two little chain links on the toolbar to insert a link. If you click the square icon that looks like it has two little mountains, this will allow you to insert an image. Unfortunately, this image has to be hosted on the web somewhere. It doesn’t allow you to upload one from your computer. You can see what I am talking about in the image below. I also ran into some issues trying to do this in Internet Explorer 8. Chrome worked fine.

Once you have your image inserted and all of the text is just the way you want it, click the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page. Note, you may have to scroll down a ways to see this button.

I hope you have enjoyed today’s tutorial. Gmail can do a lot of the things you may have come to expect from apps such as Outlook. You just have to dig in sometime to find what you’re looking for. As always, we love hearing your feedback. Thanks for reading Techie Buzz.

A few months back I had written about an interesting web app which allowed users to schedule emails in Gmail. The add-on for browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox worked very well and did its job. However, there is another entrant called "Right Inbox" which provides a similar service but is simpler to use.

Also Read: How To Send Anonymous Email | Temporary Disposable Email Services

While Boomerang for Gmail provides much more than just scheduling emails in Gmail, Right Inbox’s only focus lies on scheduling emails in Gmail. Once you install the Right Inbox extension refresh you Gmail page and you will be guided through grant permissions to the app to your Gmail Inbox.

Once you have granted permissions to the Right Inbox app, you will be able to schedule emails in Gmail with the click of a button. Right Inbox will add an additional button to the compose email workflow (as seen above) allowing you to send the email at a later time.

Clicking on the "Send Later" button will give you several options to schedule the email. You can either click on the options provided or choose to send the email at a specific time. Once you have scheduled your email, the email will be stored in your drafts folder and will be delivered at the time you chose. The best part is that you don’t have to be near your computer once you have scheduled your email and Right Inbox will do the work for you.

Right Inbox is currently available as a Google Chrome extension and Firefox add-on and can be downloaded from here.

Since the day Google Plus opened up for everyone, the message from Google team has been pretty clear. Lets focus our attention towards people and re-invent every other Google product (keeping Google Plus in the centre). This includes Google search, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Maps, Authorship in search results, YouTube and what not.

Google is heavily focusing on the strength of peoplewith whom you connect and share in real life; familiar faces have already started appearing on search results, Google Maps, Google Reader and so forth.

How can Gmail stay behind? With the new Gmail and Google Plus integration, you get all your Google Plus friends and contacts within your Gmail inbox, so this update makes it easy to find messages that are related to specific Google Plus friends and contacts.The next time you login in to your Gmail account that is tied with a Google Plus account, you might see a new drop down menu on the left sidebar, as shown in the following screenshot:

The Circlesdropdown works exactly as labels work in Gmail and allows you to filter sent or received messages from people who are present in your Google Plus circles. For example: I have a circle named mediain my Google Plus account, which I have made to filter journalists and reporters I know. Now that the Circle filterin Google Plus is active, I can quickly find all the emails that were either sent to or received from anyone, who is present in the circle named as Media. I don’t have to remember their names, email addresses and the subject of a previous conversation.

Google has also integrated contact information of your Google Plus friends within Google contacts.

This has two advantages. First, you can export the contact details of all your Google Plus friends as a CSV file and import it on another Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail account. This is lifesaving, when you are permanently switching to a different email address and need a one click option to export all your email contacts and Google plus contacts from a central location.

I use a separate Gmail account for Google Plus and my work email address is on Google Apps, which is not tied to any Google Plus account. Hence, in my case, Gmail contacts and Google Plus contacts will be disjoint sets. But if you are not like me and use the same Gmail account for Google Plus and as your primary work email address; this update will simplify contact management to the next level.

Please note that only people who are sharing with you on Google Plus and have added you to their circles, will be added to your Google contacts. Adding someone to any of your Google Plus circles wont add his email address to your Google contacts list, so this will keep spam emails at bay. Another strong reason why you should be very careful in choosing whom you are sharing with on Google Plus.

The People widget, which Google started showing on Gmail’s right sidebar from May2011, will now include status updates, posts and recent links from people who are involved in a conversation.

Whenever any of your Google Plus friends send you an email, you will be able to interact with them, directly from the people widget on the right sidebar. Another nice feature I must mention is the ability to share photo attachments in Gmail directly on your Google Plus profile. Just hit the Sharebutton next to any attached photo, type in your message in the browser overlay window and choose the circles with whom you want to share.

Be careful with whom you share photo attachments in Gmail because once you hit Sharewith the default option (Your Circles) being checked, anyone can see that photo or download it on his computer.

As usual, Google Apps users are out of luck but Google said that it is a work in progress.

Since Google started out with Google Docs, they have been adding a lot of new interesting features to the service to compete with the likes of Microsoft Office. Of late, the competition is really steaming up and Microsoft is battling to win back the online documents supremacy. However, Google’s integration of Google Docs with Gmail and their other services offers users an option to open and view documents, images and PSD files in their email without having to download them locally.

I have been using the option to open documents and PDF files in Google Docs for quite sometime now. However, one feature I found missing was the ability to open password protected PDF files in Google Docs.

Also Read: Remove Password from PDF Files | Unlock Password Protected PDF Files

It looks like that the Google Docs viewer just got smarter (or that it was already but I noticed it now) and allows you to open password protected PDF files without having to download them to your local computer.

The new feature is currently available for PDF files only and I wasn’t able to test it with a regular Office 2010 word document which was password protected. Hopefully, Google should add a feature for other password documents soon.