Official Gmail Blog
News, tips and tricks from Google's Gmail team and friends.
Detecting suspicious account activity
March 24, 2010
Posted by Pavni Diwanji, Engineering Director
A few weeks ago, I got an email presumably from a friend stuck in London asking for some money to help him out. It turned out that the email was sent by a scammer who had hijacked my friend's account. By reading his email, the scammer had figured out my friend's whereabouts and was emailing all of his contacts. Here at Google, we work hard to protect Gmail accounts against this kind of abuse. Today we're introducing a new feature to notify you when we detect suspicious login activity on your account.
You may remember that a while back we launched
remote sign out and information about recent account activity
to help you understand and manage your account usage. This information is still at the bottom of your inbox. Now, if it looks like something unusual is going on with your account, we’ll also alert you by posting a warning message saying, "Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…" along with the geographic region that we can best associate with the access.
To determine when to display this message, our automated system matches the relevant
IP address
, logged per the
Gmail privacy policy
, to a broad geographical location. While we don't have the capability to determine the specific location from which an account is accessed, a login appearing to come from one country and occurring a few hours after a login from another country may trigger an alert.
By clicking on the "Details" link next to the message, you'll see the last account activity window that you're used to, along with the most recent access points.
If you think your account has been compromised, you can change your password from the same window. Or, if you know it was legitimate access (e.g. you were traveling, your husband/wife who accesses the account was also traveling, etc.), you can click "Dismiss" to remove the message.
Keep in mind that these notifications are meant to alert you of suspicious activity but are not a replacement for account security best practices. If you'd like more information on account security, read these tips on
keeping your information secure
or visit the
Google Online Security Blog
.
Finally, we know that security is also a top priority for businesses and schools, and we look forward to offering this feature to Google Apps customers once we have gathered and incorporated their feedback.
Smart Rescheduler in Google Calendar Labs
March 18, 2010
Posted by David Marmaros, Software Engineer
As you can imagine, those of us on the Google Calendar team spend a lot of time thinking about scheduling. We regularly talk to people who schedule and reschedule
a lot
of meetings: administrative assistants. Talking to them, we understand just how much time they spend looking at schedules, investigating other people's calendars, finding replacement conference rooms and rescheduling conflicts. And then some manager's travel plans change and everything starts over again.
If you're searching for something on the web, you don't just start randomly visiting pages looking for relevant content, you use a search engine. So we decided to apply some of Google's search experience to the problem of scheduling. We experimented with using ranking algorithms to return the most relevant meeting times based on specified criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times.
Today we're launching the result of that experiment, a gadget called Smart Rescheduler, in
Google Calendar Labs
. Once you turn it on, just select an event you'd like to reschedule, then click "Find a new time...":
You'll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby. This process is 100% automated — no Google employees are doing any work behind the scenes. You can refine the results by marking people as optional, changing the meeting duration, ignoring certain conflicts, or specifying the earliest and latest times you'll accept. The results will immediately update to reflect your new requirements.
This feature is still experimental, so we'd love your
ideas and feedback
. Of course, we can't make meetings more interesting, but we can try to save you frustration leading up to them.
Better controls for buzz in your inbox
March 13, 2010
Posted by Bruce DiBello, Software Engineer
When you participate in a conversation in Google Buzz, we bring that post to your inbox to make it easy to keep up with the discussion. But we’ve heard loud and clear that buzz in your inbox can get noisy — we feel it too, so today we're launching two features to help with this:
1. Settings to control what gets sent to your inbox
From the
Buzz tab of Gmail Settings
, you’ll be able to choose whether the following buzz items get sent to your inbox:
Comments on your posts
Comments on posts after you comment on them
Comments on posts after you are @replied on them
2. Explanations for why posts get sent to your inbox and an easy-to-find “Mute” link
You'll see a new message at the top of each post in your inbox that explains why it’s there: someone commented on your post, you were @replied, etc. We’ve also added an easy-to-find “mute” link that will stop subsequent comments from bringing the conversation back to your inbox.
These are just the first in series of features designed to help control the noise level in Google Buzz, so stay tuned for more. If you have ideas for Google Buzz you'd like to share with the team, you can post your ideas and vote for others on our official
Product Ideas page
.
3 new Calendar Labs
March 10, 2010
Posted by Grace Kwak, Product Manager
Today, we're happy to announce three new features in Calendar Labs. To try them out, just go to the
Labs tab under Calendar Settings
.
1. Event flair
by Dave Marmaros
Want a little airplane icon next to information about your upcoming flight? Or stars next to meetings with your boss? This experiment lets you choose from forty different icons and add one to each Calendar event. Even better, if you invite people to your events, they'll be able to see the icon you added too. After you enable this feature, click on an event and look for the "Event flair" gadget to activate.
2. Gentle reminders
by Sorin Mocanu
If you keep Google Calendar open all day long, you probably end up seeing quite a few reminders every day. Browser alerts are okay, but I tried to find a way for Calendar notifications to integrate smoothly with everything else.
Turn on "Gentle Reminders," and when you get a notification, the title of your Calendar window or tab will start blinking and the event details will stay in Calendar.
If you're using this lab in a supported browser (currently Google Chrome for Windows and Google Chrome beta for Linux), you'll also have the option to get your reminders in the next generation of floating desktop notifications:
After you enable this feature, you can configure notification options on the Settings page.
3. Automatically declining events
by Lucia Fedorova and Miguel García
Have you ever checked your calendar and noticed that someone scheduled a really important meeting during your vacation or at a time when you're not available? Now there's a way to automatically decline events when you're not around. Turn on "Automatically declining events," block off times when you're unavailable, and event invitations during this period will get automatically declined.
New in Labs: Refresh POP accounts
March 8, 2010
Posted by Emmanuel Pellereau, Software Engineer
My little sister recently setup her Gmail account to
retrieve messages
from her school address, so she can check all of her email accounts in one place. She no longer has to constantly log in to two email programs, and she likes using Gmail's powerful interface for all her mail.
However, sometimes she knows an email has already been sent to her school address, and she just can't wait for the next scheduled fetch to have it show up in her Gmail inbox. As any big brother would, I tried to solve this issue for her and millions of Gmail users.
Turn on "Refresh POP accounts" from the
Labs tab
under Settings, and the refresh link at the top of your inbox will not only update your inbox with your new Gmail messages, it will also fetch messages from any other accounts which you have set up.
Try it out, and
let us know
if you have any feedback.
Fast new windows
March 1, 2010
Posted by Michael Davidson, Software Engineer
One of the lesser-known features of Gmail is its ability to help with multitasking. Frequently, I find that I need to find an old message while I'm composing an email. When this happens, I click on the "new window" icon to pop my compose area into its own window:
There's only one problem — it's been slow! Today, we're rolling out a change that will fix this (reload your account to make sure you get this change). Now, popping out a window is much, much faster. No more "Loading..." progress bar.
There are a number of places you can pop up new windows in Gmail.
In chat, there's the little upward arrow in the title bar:
When writing a message, hold the "Shift" key while you click on the Compose Mail, Reply, Reply All or Forward links and you'll get a new window for your new message. (Holding the "Shift" key while typing the keyboard shortcut — in other words typing "C" "R" or "F" — has the same effect.)
When you're reading your mail, hold the "Shift" key while you click on a message to open the conversation in a new window. (Same holds true for the "Shift" key and the "o" or "Enter" shortcuts.)
If you're reading an email and want to save it for later, you can click the "New window" link in the upper-right hand corner of the conversation view:
Keep in mind that the popped out window does not outlive the closing of the original Gmail window, although we're working on a way to make that better. Unfortunately, we weren't able to make this work in Internet Explorer, so to see the speed-up, you'll need to be using Mozilla Firefox, Apple's Safari, or Google Chrome.
Gmail Labs graduation and retirement
February 24, 2010
Posted by Mark Knichel, Software Engineer
We
launched Gmail Labs
over a year and a half ago as a playground where engineers can come up with new features and let your input help decide which are good ideas and which don't quite work out. Any engineer at Google can come up with a feature, code it, and launch it quickly to tens of millions of users.
Labs started out with 13 features and quickly grew to 60, with even more on the way. We've received countless comments and kept an eye on our stats: some of these experimental features were adopted by millions and others trickled along with little usage. A couple have already graduated from Labs and we've already retired one: Tasks was the first to
become a regular part of Gmail
, Right-side Labels was retired when we
updated the way labels work
, and Offline Gmail
graduated
a couple months back. Today, true to the original intent of Gmail Labs, we're graduating six more features and retiring five.
Graduating:
Search Autocomplete
Go To Label
Forgotten Attachment Detector
YouTube Previews
Custom Label Colors
Vacation Dates
Retiring:
Muzzle
Fixed Width Font
Email Addict
Location in Signature
Random Signature
These decisions were made based based mainly on usage, taking feature polish and your feedback into account. We've also tweaked some of the graduating features to improve them before making them default Gmail features. For example, we've combined Go To Label with Search Autocomplete, making it easier than ever for you to find what you're looking for.
Search Autocomplete and Go To Label
Start typing in the Gmail search box (English only for now), and Gmail suggests terms that might help you find what you're looking for — from contact names to labels and
advanced search operators
.
We've integrated Go To Label into this search box as well. If you have
keyboard shortcuts
turned on, type "g" then "l" and instead of getting the old "Go to label" pop-up, you'll be in the search box with the "label:" operator filled in for you. Start typing the label you want to go to, and autocomplete will take it from there. All you have to do is hit enter. If you want to send your cursor to the blank search field, the keyboard shortcut "/" will do it.
Forgotten Attachment Detector
From time to time, we all forget to attach a file and sheepishly send another email with the forgotten attachment. To help save you from that embarrassment, Gmail looks for phrases in your email that suggest you meant to attach a file and alerts you if it looks like you forgot an attachment.
YouTube Previews
If you're like me, your friends probably often email you links to YouTube videos. Instead of having to click on the link and wait for a new window to load before you can watch the video, Gmail now shows YouTube previews right below the message. All you have to do is click the play button and enjoy.
Custom Label Colors
Why settle for a restrictive palette when you can choose from over 4000 possible color combinations to help distinguish and organize your labels? Just click on "Add custom color" from the regular labels interface.
Vacation Dates
If you specify which dates you'll be away in advance, you won't have to remember to turn on the
vacation responder
when when you're actually on vacation. Set your dates in advance, and let Gmail do the rest.
Retiring features is always a tough decision — we invest in building and maintaining them and we realize some of you are probably fans of some of Gmail's lesser-used features. But Labs are experimental features, and from time to time they may break (that's why there's a quick way to
disable
them), or even disappear. Over the next few days, you'll see Muzzle, Fixed Width Font, Email Addict, Location in Signature, and Random Signature stop working and disappear from the Labs tab.
We'll keep working on new Labs to help make your Gmail experience even better, and we'll continue to graduate successful features and retire the ones that don’t work out to make room for new ones. Thank you to all the engineers who have worked on Labs features — especially Bruce, Darick, Jon (the intern), Ibrahim, Chris, Keith, Chad, Michael, and Marco! Please continue to send us
feedback
and remember that you vote for your favorite Labs features by using them and leaving comments.
5 more Buzz tips: post by email, follow the Buzz team, and more
February 22, 2010
Posted by Brian Stoler, Tech Lead, Google Buzz
1. Post by email.
You can post buzz by emailing buzz@gmail.com — super handy for posting photos you take on your phone. Photos that you attach to your email will appear along with the subject line of your message. You can choose who can see posts you email into Buzz from the
connected sites
menu (click "Buzz," then "Connected Sites").
2. Prevent your boring chat status messages from being posted to Buzz.
By default, your chat status messages are posted to Buzz and shared with your chat contacts. Don't want a boring message like "be right back" to turn into a Buzz post? Just put parentheses around it. If you don't want any of your chat status messages to get posted, you can always disconnect chat from the
connected sites
menu.
3. Look for the yellow line to see what's new.
Can't figure out what's new on the Buzz tab? Posts and comments new since your last visit have a light yellow line along the left hand edge (if you're using a different theme the color may vary).
4. Link to a post.
Each Buzz post has a permalink, so you can link to it. Click the down-arrow in the upper right-hand corner of a post, and select "Link to this post." Of course, you'lll only be able to see the posts you have access to.
5. Follow the Buzz team in Google Buzz.
Visit
buzz.google.com/googlebuzz
and click "Follow Google Buzz" to get updates about what we're working on and send us your feedback.
5 Buzz tips
February 18, 2010
Posted by John Costigan, Software Engineer
Now that people have been playing with Google Buzz in Gmail for a week and we've rolled out the
improvements
we announced here over the weekend, we wanted to let you know about some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Buzz. Here are five tips to get you started:
1. Format your posts
. When posting in Buzz, you can format text just as you can in Gmail chat: *bold*, _italics_, or -strikethrough- all work.
2. View a summary of your own Buzz activity at
www.google.com/dashboard
. The
Google Dashboard
provides a private, consolidated summary of the data associated with your Google account, as well as direct links to control your personal settings. As of today, Buzz has its own section on the Dashboard, so you can see how many people you're following, how many people are following you, and information about your recent posts, comments, and likes. You can also access your Buzz settings right there on the page.
3. Use an @reply to send a post directly to someone's inbox
. If you want to make sure one of your friends sees a certain Buzz post, you can direct it to their inbox with an @reply. Type the "@" symbol followed by the first few letters of their name, and select their email address from the list. Only you'll see their Gmail address — other people will just see their name.
4. Try keyboard shortcuts to fly through buzz
. Turn on keyboard shortcuts from
Settings
, and use "j" or "n" to scroll down the buzz tab, "k" or "p" to go back up, "r" to comment (same shortcut as reply in Gmail), and "shift + l" to like.
5. Mute posts so they don't get sent to your inbox.
Comments on your posts and comments after your comments send buzz directly to your inbox. If you don't want a lively conversation to keep appearing in your inbox as people reply to it, you can mute it. Click the arrow in the corner of a buzz post and select "Mute this post."
If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, you can also mute buzz that appears in your inbox by hitting the "m" key while you're reading it.
Check out our
Help Center
for more tips and answers to your common questions, and stay tuned for more here as well.
A new Buzz start-up experience based on your feedback
February 13, 2010
Posted by Todd Jackson, Product Manager, Gmail and Google Buzz
We've heard your feedback loud and clear, and since we launched Google Buzz four days ago, we've been working around the clock to address the concerns you've raised. Today, we wanted to let you know about a number of changes we'll be making over the next few days based on all the feedback we've received.
First, auto-following. With Google Buzz, we wanted to make the getting started experience as quick and easy as possible, so that you wouldn't have to manually peck out your social network from scratch. However, many people just wanted to check out Buzz and see if it would be useful to them, and were not happy that they were already set up to follow people. This created a great deal of concern and led people to think that Buzz had automatically displayed the people they were following to the world before they created a profile.
On Thursday, after hearing that people thought the checkbox for choosing not to display this information publicly was too hard to find, we
made this option more prominent
. But that was clearly not enough. So starting this week, instead of an auto-
follow
model in which Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with most, we're moving to an auto-
suggest
model. You won't be set up to follow anyone until you have reviewed the suggestions and clicked "Follow selected people and start using Buzz."
For the tens of millions of you who have already started using Buzz, over the next couple weeks we'll be showing you a similar version of this new start-up experience to give you a second chance to review and confirm the people you're following. If you want to review this list now, just go to the Buzz tab, click "Following XX people" and unfollow anyone you wish. If you don't want to share the lists of people who are following you and people you are following publicly on your profile, you can opt out at any time from the
edit profile page
.
Second, Buzz will no longer connect your public Picasa Web Albums and Google Reader shared items automatically. Just to be clear: Buzz only automatically connected content that was already public, so if you had previously shared photos in an "Unlisted" album or set your Google Reader shared items as "Protected," no one except the people you'd explicitly allowed to see your stuff has been able to see it. But due to your feedback Buzz will no longer connect these sites automatically.
Third, we're adding a Buzz tab to Gmail Settings. From there, you'll be able to hide Buzz from Gmail or disable it completely. In addition, there will be a link to these settings from the initial start-up page so you can easily decide from the get go that you don't want to use Buzz at all.
It's been an exciting and challenging week for the Buzz team. We've been getting feedback via the Gmail help forums and emails from friends and family, and we've also been able to do something new: read the buzz about Buzz itself. We quickly realized that we didn't get everything quite right. We're very sorry for the concern we've caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback. We'll continue to do so.
Update (2/18):
These changes are now live with the exception of the similar version of the start-up experience for those of you who are already using Buzz.
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