Archives For GMail

AIM, GMail, and Google Talk now talk to one another

By Paul Spoerry —  May 20, 2011 — 1 Comment

I can finally ditch AIM! I don’t actually have AIM installed, but it is one of the protocols I use in my multi-IM clients. I have several people who are still on AIM and that’s the way I communicate with them via chat. AOL and Google have finally completed interoperability among AIM, Gmail and Google Talk.
For a while now Gmail users have been able to access their AIM account via Google Talk. The downside was that AIM accounts couldn’t message Google Talk accounts and vice versa; this really limited the usefulness of AIM within Gmail. Google just announced on a blog post that the two IM giants have made some interoperability changes to their chat clients.

The first change is that AIM users can now send messages to their Google contacts and vice versa. It makes no difference which client you are using. You can IM a friend that uses AIM via Google Talk, Gmail, iGoogle, or any other Gtalk client. Gmail users will soon see a prompt asking them to add their AIM friends to Gtalk. You’ll have to append @aol.com to the end of the AIM contact you’re trying to add to make it work. In other words to add JohnJohnson you’d have to enter [email protected] Simple enough.

Because users can add AIM contacts via Gmail now, Google has removed the ability to sign in to AIM. That might pose a problem for users with a ton of AIM contacts but AOL has created a tool to help you migrate your AIM buddies to Gmail. If you’re using Two-Factor Authentication with your Google Account you’ll need to create and provide an Application Specific Password for the import tool. It is temporary though, one time use, and you can delete it once the tool has run it’s course.

The changes are slowly rolling out to all users so if you don’t see it right now just give it a bit and you’ll see it soon. Keep in mind that Google and AOL have tens of millions of IM users each. While this is great for us end users it’s also likely a play to fend off the onslaught of users relying on Facebook’s FbChat service as well as Skype, which has more than 500 million users and was just purchased by Microsoft.

In Facebook, GMail, Google, iGoogle, Tech, Web Life ,
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Government Doesnt Need A Warrant to Snoop at Your Cloud Emails

By Paul Spoerry —  April 14, 2011 — Leave a comment

Do you use Gmail or other email cloud service? Then you’d be surprised to learn that according to the law, the government can get your email without a warrant if it’s older than 180 days. David Kravets of Wired’s Threat Level explains:

As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986. At that time, e-mail left on a third-party server for six months was considered to be abandoned, and thus enjoyed less privacy protection. However, the law demands warrants for the authorities to seize e-mail from a person’s hard drive.

A coalition of internet service providers and other groups, known as Digital Due Process, has lobbied for an update to the law to treat both cloud- and home-stored e-mail the same, and thus require a probable-cause warrant for access. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on that topic Tuesday.

The companies — including Google, AOL and AT&T — maintain that the law should be changed to reflect that consumers increasingly access their e-mail on servers, instead of downloading it to their hard drives, as a matter of course.

But the Obama administration testified that imposing constitutional safeguards on e-mail stored in the cloud would be an unnecessary burden on the government. Probable-cause warrants would only get in the government’s way.

Also note that in 2008, candidate Obama took the opposite position as now-President Obama.

In GMail, Google, Politics, Tech, Web Life , , ,
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Disables Third-Party Tracking While Keeping Webapps Operational-Disconnect

By Paul Spoerry —  December 14, 2010 — Leave a comment

Chrome/Rockmelt: It always seems like a simple, if brutal, call: either keep your cookies, or lose access to a working Gmail, Facebook, and other neat services. Enter Disconnect, an extension that de-personalizes your browsing without cutting off necessary functionality.

Install Disconnect in Chrome or Rockmelt, and you’ll notice it starts building up a tally in its taskbar icon. Click the button, and you can see how many requests—where you came from, where you’re going, what you searched for before, whether your Facebook friends like this page, etc.—Disconnect has blocked from Google, Twitter, Facebook, and other services. Webapps can still do their basic magic, but they lose sight of you as a person whose decisions they can easily track.

Disconnect is a free download for Chrome and the Rockmelt variation. It’s also open source and made by a former Google employee.

Disconnect [via TechCrunch]

In Chrome, Facebook, GMail, Google, Privacy, Tech, Web Life ,
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Gmail Unleashes Google Voice: Make Free Calls from Your Inbox

By Paul Spoerry —  August 25, 2010 — Leave a comment

Gmail is integrating Google Voice and providing free calls to the U.S. and Canada, as well as cheap international calls, directly into Gmail.

Here’s the word from Google:

Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan-and many more countries-for as little as $0.02 per minute.

Gmail Integrates with Google Voice for Free Calls from Your Inbox

As soon as it’s available in your account, you’ll see a Call phone link in the Chat sidebar of Gmail. Click it, search for a contact or dial their number, and booya—phone call. If you’ve already got a Google Voice number, calls you make from Gmail will show your Voice number in that person’s caller ID. You can also receive calls (if you want) made to your Voice number directly in Gmail—making it a fully functional VoIP solution.

You’ll need to have installed the Voice and Video plug-in to use it. No support for Google Apps accounts yet but Google says they’re working on it.

Call phones from Gmail

In GMail, Google, iGoogle, Tech, Web Life
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Drag and Drop Gmail Attachments

By Paul Spoerry —  April 16, 2010 — Leave a comment

Gmail added support for a HTML5 feature that has been recently included in Firefox and Google Chrome: selecting files using drag and drop. If you use Firefox 3.6+ or Chrome 4+, you can now add attachments by dragging the files from your favorite file manager to Gmail. When you drag the files, Gmail shows a drop zone where you need to place the files.


“We’ll enable this for other browsers as soon as they support this feature. For now, you can drag and drop attachments in Chrome and Firefox only,” mentions Google.

The nice thing about this feature is that it no longer uses the Flash uploader, which isn’t very reliable. What I don’t understand is why Gmail still uses the Flash uploader to select multiple files directly from the browser, now that the input tag supports more than one file. If you disable Flash in Firefox 3.6 and don’t use drag and drop, you can only attach one file at a time:

In Chrome, FireFox, GMail, Google, Tech, Web Life
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