The eagle-eyed Google Operating System noted today that when you’re out of emails to read, Google drops a nice warm message asking you to come check out Google+:

The handy link sends you to the “What’s Hot” section of Google+, clearly hoping to engage you in any way possible on its social network. It’s probably mostly seen by new Gmail users who have also been given a Google+ account automatically.

While this isn’t a bad thing necessarily, it’s just more proof that Google is absolutely all-in when it comes to social. Shoot, you can’t even Google yourself anymore without getting nagged to update your profile.

Google has announced some changes to its popular Chrome app that allows you to access your Gmail account offline.

The biggest feature of the bunch is the ability to now choose how many days of email you’d like to synchronize for offline viewing. The options are 7, 14 or 31 days now. If you have a long flight or plan on spending some quiet time in the woods, this feature will definitely come in handy.

Additionally, the Google team has made some performance enhancements that doesn’t make using the offline app feel like such a chore anymore:

Improved attachments: All attachments are now downloaded and available for offline use
Keyboard shortcuts support: If you have keyboard shortcuts enabled in Gmail, your setting will transfer over to the Gmail offline app. If you’re not sure what you can do with keyboard shortcuts, try pressing ‘?’ next time you’re using Gmail or Gmail offline.
Numerous performance enhancements: Messages and attachments now download at a faster rate and some bugs have been fixed.

Pulling over your settings is great, but the new handling of attachments is absolutely clutch. Before this update, there were many times that you’d try to grab one of your attachments while offline and it simply wasn’t there because you forgot to download them beforehand.

As the offline product has evolved, it’s looking more and more like Microsoft’s Outlook than the original version of Gmail, but nobody seems to be complaining about that. I for one appreciate the team keeping an eye on speed rather than making its UI overly fancy.

➤ Offline Google Mail for Chrome

Google has announced today that its extending free calling within Gmail through 2012 for calls made within the United States and Canada. This is of course similar to its announcement for 2011.

In an extremely brief blog post today, Google announced the move:

As the holiday season approaches, we’re happy to announce that we’ve extended free domestic calls within the US and Canada for 2012.

This is our way of helping you connect with friends and family across the country. And you can still call the rest of the world from Gmail at our insanely low rates.

Google Voice is still trying to become the default VOIP carrier online, with Skype being its main competition. Voice has found its way into not only Gmail, but into Google+ Hangouts as well.

Our friends at Lifehacker shared a heck of a tip today. Setting up Google’s Gmail, Calendar, and Contacts on your iOS device can be a multi-step process. This tip makes it all one step.

Thank goodness for this, because we know that the official Google Gmail App for iOS was a flop.

It’s a bit of a hack, but it definitely works:

The key is when setting up a new Email account, choose Microsoft Exchange instead of Gmail. It gives you access to contacts and calendars, and everything will sync on your iOS device seamlessly. Whenever you add a new contact or calendar invite, everything will move over in real-time.

• Open up the Settings app on your iOS device and go to the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” section. Hit “Add Account”.
• From there, choose Microsoft Exchange as the type of account (again, don’t choose Gmail).
• Type in your Gmail address under Email. Leave the Domain field blank and enter your full Gmail address under Username (including the @gmail.com, @googlemail.com, or other suffix). Type in your password and give it any description you like. Mine’s just called “Gmail”.
• Press the Next button at the top of the screen. It should pop up a message saying Unable to Verify Certificate—if it does, just hit cancel. Then, type m.google.com in the new “Server” box that shows up at the top of the screen. Then tap Next.

After that, you should be ready to rock with no headaches. Everything will update in real-time so there’s no need to do manual syncs or worry about push notifications. Thank you Lifehacker!

Today, the long awaited native iOS app for Gmail was launched by Google.

Some of us were having issues with the app as soon as it opened, and Google has decided to take the app down.

In a tweet, the Gmail team said:

The iOS app we launched today contained a bug with notifications. We have pulled the app to fix the problem. Sorry we messed up.

In a follow-up tweet, “Google Apps Guy” Dave Girouard apologized as well:

While first versions of new apps are primarily meant to capture an install base and focus on stability rather than features, it seems like Google missed the mark this time.

With Apple’s approval process sometimes taking weeks, how long will it be before Gmail for iOS makes its way back to the store? We’ll keep you updated.

“Googla culpa” indeed.

According to Google Operating System, Gmail, Google’s popular email system, is rolling out a facelift for the service.

Google took many years to lift the “beta” tag from Gmail, and has continued to iterate on the product via its “labs” section. Some of us have already been using the preview pane for a while, which will look very familiar to Microsoft Outlook and Apple Mail users.

According to some people who already have access to the new default theme, text labels have been replaced with an action bar of icons, new interface for conversations, a better layout for all browsers in any size, and updated search box with advanced options.

Android 4.0 users will definitely recognize this new interface.

Some screenshots below show the simplifying of Gmail, which I’ve personally been using since it has launched.

The company has appeared to have posted a video about the new Gmail look on YouTube, but it is currently marked as private:

Google continues to slowly and methodically rollout changes to its products, rather than rush them. Vic Gundotra spoke yesterday about not wanting to rush Google+’s API’s, and would rather make sure the system is solid before bringing in third-party developers.

UPDATE: An awesome reader of ours, Michel, saved the video before it was gone and put it up on Vimeo.

Catch today’s latest Google news at TNW Google.

If you use Gmail, you know that one of the best features of the service is search. We would expect that since it’s a Google product. Even Google can’t come up with every great feature for Gmail on its own though, so Attachments.me decided to release a Chrome extension to enhance your Gmail search experience.

To view attachements in Gmail currently, you have to search for them, drill down to the email, preview the attachement or actually open them. That can be a pain. But with the new extension from Attachments.me, you are shown a thumbnail in the actual search result of the attachement.

A slideshow of attachment thumbnails are shown at the top of your Gmail search.

Attachments.me is fully focused on making finding file attachements easier. It’s a pretty niche focus, but a smart one, as file attachements are something that we deal with everyday during our work and home hours.

The company has also published a new video that tells you everything you need to know about Attachments.me:

Finding all of your online “stuff” is difficult. You have email, tweets, and Facebook status updates. You toss them all into the internet. If you were to try and find one of these items, it could be pretty difficult. Sure, search in Gmail is pretty great, but Twitter’s search isn’t so great, and neither is Facebook’s. Greplin is a “personal search engine that allows you to search all your online data in one easy place.”

Greplin says its goal is to “make Greplin the search bar for your life.” That’s a lofty goal, but we can immediately see why Greplin is such an important service. We interviewed the 19 year old founder of Greplin, Daniel Gross, in March.

The first thing you do is sign up for free. After that you can connect to your accounts, and the most popular ones are free, which is nice. Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Google Calendars, Google Docs, and Google Contacts should get you searching for things you thought were gone, fast. Greplin has other site connections available for a $4.99 a month (or $49.99 a year) upgrade. It’s all about your personal online habits though, so there’s no requirement to upgrade.

Once you’ve connected your accounts (it’s secure, Greplin promises), you should start seeing that your data is available to search on within about 20 minutes. The company does search indexes every 20 minutes after that.

The power of Greplin is that you don’t have to have all of these connected accounts open in other browsers or tabs. To find things, all you need to do is bring up the Greplin site, or use the Greplin iOS app to do so.

The search for “Zee” above, shows results sorted by “People” and “Streams”, and as of this writing, it was pretty much in real-time as you can see by the tweets.

Google is the king of search, most would argue, but not many people would trust Google with all of their internet logins, so Greplin may have found a huge niche for itself if the company can prove to be trustworthy and of course provide a great search experience.

The internal memo pasted below, sent to the Gawker staff from their chief technology officer Thomas Plunkett, reveals that the Gawker Hacker disaster happened in large part due to a lack of preparation and commitment by the media giant’s tech team. He apologizes to the staff and promises to be much more communicative in the future.

From: Thomas Plunkett

Subject: The Gawker Media security breach — status and moving forward
To: [Gawker staff]
Date: Friday, December 17, 2010, 4:43 PM

Everyone -

As you know, this has been the Gawker tech team’s most difficult week ever. This note has been too long coming, but the following is meant to communicate several things: what happened, our current activities, and our plans for moving forward. I suggest you read all of this as I am making several recommendations below, and we are implementing some changes that will affect all of you.

What Happened
Gawker Media servers and some company email accounts were compromised by hackers at some time during the last few weeks; the compromise was made public to us (and everyone else) this past weekend. In recent weeks, intruders were able to gain access to our web servers by exploiting a vulnerability in our source code, allowing them to gain access to user data and passwords. With this information, they were able to gain access to the editor wiki, some Gawker Media email accounts, and other external resources.

It is clear that the Gawker tech team did not adequately secure our platform from an attack of this nature. We were also not prepared to respond when it was necessary. These things can be attributed to several factors.

First, we never planned for such an event, and therefore had no systems, or processes in place to adequately respond. Our focus as a team (and company) has been on moving forward. This put up blinders on several fronts. As a result, numerous wrong decisions were made by me this past weekend in responding to the security breach.

Further, attention to completed work is every bit as important as attention to upcoming work. Our development efforts have been focused on new product while committing relatively little time to reviewing past work. This is often a fatal mistake in software development and was central to this vulnerability.

Finally, we have not only seen tremendous growth as a company, we have never been afraid to take an unpopular or controversial stance with regard to individuals or organizations. Let’s face it: we draw the ire of many. This creates a unique set of demands to meet rapid growth as well as threats that often specifically target us. We did not establish standards and practices to handle growth and the fact that we have a target on our back.

On several fronts — technically, as well as customer support and communication — we found ourselves unprepared to handle this eventuality. The tech team should have been better prepared, committed more time to perform thorough audits, and grown our team’s technical expertise to meet our specific business needs. As a result of not having done these things, we have not adhered to standards expected of us, and our response was inadequate. The remedy to this situation will not be immediate, but it will be swift as possible.

Current Activity: Regaining Control
The tech team have moved our operation to the third floor of the Gawker Media office in order to focus on the work that needs to be done. We are currently in the process of performing a complete review of what happened with an independent security firm.

Here’s what we’ve done so far to regain control:

We have been able to establish a fairly complete timeline of intrusion activity, and have identified compromised assets within Gawker. We have re-established control of compromised systems including our Google Apps accounts. As a result, you will have to reconfigure your Google Apps access (more on this below).

In addition, we have addressed all known vulnerabilities and will continue auditing our system for security flaws, and we have made appropriate changes to administrative accounts to our web and application infrastructure. There are many people reviewing our code base, and because of this, we will also reach out to members of the technical community to harness their expertise. This process will continue as we move to an entirely new, hardened web infrastructure.

We have introduced a help desk to address commenter concerns related to the breach. This will continue to exist as long as it is needed. Scott, Greg, Jeremy, Nick and a host of interns, and many of you, have been active in the threads, and communicating as much as possible as we work through this event.

Moving Forward
We’ve learned many lessons from this experience, both as a tech team, as a company, and as individuals. If there’s one lesson nearly all of us learned, it’s that we can and must be smarter with passwords. Lifehacker is a great resource for password advice (and there are many others). I suggest you start here: http://lifehacker.com/184773/geek-to-live–choose-and-remember-great-passwords.

Efffective immediately, we have enabled SSL, a more secure method of communicating over the internet, for all users with Gawker Media accounts on Google Apps (this does not affect your personal Gmail). Those of you not using web-based Gmail will have to reconfigure your clients (this includes any desktop mail client as well as other devices). The attached document provides instructions to make this easier, and includes information to configure different devices including iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones.

Also effective immediately: If you require access to sensitive materials (legal, financial, or accounting documents) on Google Docs, you must have two-factor authentication setup on your account. No documents will be shared with personal Gmail accounts. We are also strongly encouraging all staff to setup two-factor authorization even if you do not require access to sensitive material.

We will enforce a policy that sensitive information not be posted to the editor wiki. This policy will also apply to chat communications (e.g., Campfire, AIM).

On all of our sites, we will be introducing several new features to our commenting system to acknowledge the reality that we have lost the commenters’ trust and don’t deserve it back. We should not be in the business of collecting and storing personal information, and our objective is to migrate our platform away from any personal data dependencies (like email & password). We will push further integration of external account verification sources using OAuth (like Facebook, Twitter, and Google) for those that want to use them, and we’ll also be introducing disposable accounts. Disposable accounts are similar to the service a pre-paid phone offers to drug dealers (a disposable, untraceable communication device). Commenters seeking anonymity will be able to do so confident that when necessary they can simply toss out the account and there will be no connection to the individual. They will work like this:
- no password will be stored
- no email will be stored
- account can be used as long as you have the key code; lose or delete it, the account is abandoned.

In addition, we are establishing a public Gawker Tech & Product blog (a long time coming) from which we will communicate product information as well as product plans to our readers. You can expect to see it by early next week.

This has been a very unfortunate event in Gawker Media history, and we have learned much from it. Above all, this has been an enormous inconvenience for everyone affected, and for this I apologize. You can expect a much more responsive and proactive technology and product team for 2011. You can also expect a much more public me — if there is one critical thing that has been missing, it is a lack of consistent communication from me. That will change.

Regards,

Tom Plunkett

We just wrote a post on the easiest way to check if your e-mail address is on Gawker‘s Hacker List, but we realize it may have been a little tricky.

Our good friends at Slate have built a simple widget to find  out whether your info was indeed on Gawker’s hacked list. Just type in your e-mail address and voila. Test it out here. It looks like this:

Phew!