Gmail Now Lets You Make Longer Labels (Without Wasting Screen Space) [In Brief]

Another Gmail bonus. Not that I have super long labels.

Gmail Now Lets You Make Longer Labels (Without Wasting Screen Space) [In Brief]: "

Up until today, you could only make new Gmail labels that were 40 characters long—which could sometimes prove difficult. They've now extended that limit to 225 characters, giving you a lot more leeway in how you organize your messages. They've also truncated the actual labels themselves in your inbox, so they don't take up too much space if they're long or buried in a long trail of nested folders (mousing over them, however, will show you the full label name or path). It's just a few small changes, but certainly welcome ones for label addicts. [Official Gmail Blog] More »"

Facebook Mail?

Given the amount of times I've had to "re-secure" my account settings, I think I'll pass on this one. At least I think/hope the data Google makes available is anonymous. When developers have access to the data (Farmville) you can be sure it's not.

Why You'll Give Up Gmail for Facebook Mail [Facebook]:

"Get ready for a new invasion wave from Facebook: Mail. According to Techcrunch's sources, a full webmail client integrated with The One and Only Social Network will debut next Monday. This is why it may become your favorite webmail service. More »"

GMail Enables HTTPS by Default

I've always wondered why this wasn't the case to begin with...

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To disable this feature, go to Gmail's settings page, select 'Don't always use https' and click on 'Save changes'. If you can't use Gmail offline when this feature is enabled, try this workaround.

Gmail's HTTPS Access Is Enabled by Default: "Unlike other popular webmail services, Gmail allows you to read your messages using a secure connection by visiting https://mail.google.com. In 2008, Gmail added an option that redirected you to the https version and now this option is enabled by default.

'Using https helps protect data from being snooped by third parties, such as in public wifi hotspots. We initially left the choice of using it up to you because there's a downside: https can make your mail slower since encrypted data doesn't travel across the web as quickly as unencrypted data. Over the last few months, we've been researching the security/latency tradeoff and decided that turning https on for everyone was the right thing to do,' explains Gmail's blog.

Even if this feature is restricted to Gmail, there's an interesting side-effect: if you open Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Reader by clicking on Gmail's navigational links, you'll use the https versions of those services.

Google Dashboard - For all your Google Settings

I never really thought it was hard to manage this stuff before. Perhaps I will find something new. Still this is a great idea for heavy Google users.

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Transparency, choice and control - now complete with a Dashboard!: "Posted by Alma Whitten, Software Engineer, Yariv Adan, Product Manager, and Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.)

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Google Dashboard. Have you ever wondered what data is stored with your Google Account? The Google Dashboard offers a simple view into the data associated with your account — easily and concisely in one location.

Over the past 11 years, Google has focused on building innovative products for our users. Today, with hundreds of millions of people using those products around the world, we are very aware of the trust that you have placed in us, and our responsibility to protect your privacy and data. In the past, we've taken numerous steps in this area, investing in educating our users with our Privacy Center, making it easier to move data in and out of Google with our Data Liberation Front, and allowing you to control the ads you see with interest-based advertising. Transparency, choice and control have become a key part of Google's philosophy, and today, we're happy to announce that we're doing even more.

In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we've built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we're delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard. Watch this quick video to learn more and then try it out for yourself at www.google.com/dashboard.

GMail Student Migration Glitch

Not good for Google. Even a little bad publicity in this arena is enough to prevent people from going this route.

"Going Google" Exposes Students' Email: "A ReadWriteWeb piece up on the NY Times site explores the recent glitch during the move of a number of colleges onto Google's email service that allowed a number of students to see each others' inboxes for a period of more than three days. Google would not give exact numbers, but the article concludes that about 10 schools were affected. "While the glitch itself was minor and was fixed in a few days, the real concern — at least at Brown — was with how Google handled the situation. Without communicating to the internal IT department, Google shut down the affected accounts, a decision which led to a heated conversation between school officials and the Google account representative. In the end, only 22 out of the 200 students were affected, but the fix was not put into place until Tuesday. ... The students had access to each other's email accounts for three solid days... before the accounts were suspended by Google. Oddly enough, this situation seems to be acceptable [to Brown's IT manager, who] 'praised Google for its prompt response.' (We don't know about you, but if someone else could read our email for three days, we wouldn't exactly call that 'prompt.')"