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Direct from Lifehacker: Gmail Labs has released a great new Search Autocomplete feature today that offers search suggestions for all kinds of Gmail searches, from simple search-by-contacts to more advanced search queries—like for specific attachments.

The autocomplete is very smart, too, so when you want to search for a specific attachment type—like photos—you can just choose the has photos autocomplete, and Gmail will generate the much more complicated filename:(jpg OR jpeg OR png) search operators. Handy, huh?

Likewise, it’ll autogenerate the before and after date operators for you (before:yyyy/mm/dd), which have always been too complicated to remember all that well. As always, to enable this feature, just point your browser to Gmail Labs, enable Search Autocomplete, save your changes, and enjoy.

Ok for those who don’t know what PGP is let’s first give a brief explanation. PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy. PGP encryption uses public-key cryptography and includes a system which binds the public keys to a user name and/or an e-mail address. Basically, PGP can be used to detect whether a message has been altered since it was completed and to determine whether it was actually sent by the person/entity claimed to be the sender (aka it’s a digital signature). In short it allows you to encrypt information, check the received information was not altered, and verify that it is in fact who it came from.

I know that sounds all complicated, so let me try to break it into lamens terms. You download PGP and create a public key and a private key. They are both called keys… but I prefer to look at it like this: Public Key = lock, Private Key = key. Your public key can be shared with anyone. They can use your public key to encrypt anything they want and send it to you. Once they encrypt it with your public key (aka the lock) nobody can open it but you with your private key (aka the key)… not even the sender.

Phil Zimmermann created the first version of PGP encryption way back in 1991. It’s gone through several revisions since then, changed hands many times, and has finally landed back in the hands of several ex-PGP team members who formed a new company, PGP Corporation. Confusingly PGP stands for both the company, and the technology. In reality their are open source (free) implementations of PGP that you can use.

When PGP first hit it scared the CRAP out of the government. The spooks wanted to control strong encryption, at the time PGP was created Cryptosystems using keys larger than 40 bits were then considered munitions by the government; PGP has never used keys smaller than 128 bits so it qualified at that time. Penalties for violation, if found guilty, were substantial. Zimmerman found a very novel approach to getting around this which you can read up on here.

I’ve been a PGP user for a LONG time. Most people don’t understand why. To be honest, I have very few people with whom I can send encypted or digitally signed emails too. And that’s a shame. Most people don’t understand that email travels around the net UNENCRYPTED. That’s right… it’s just like writing a letter and not even putting it in an envelope.

Ok so what’s this have to do with Google and Gmail? Apparently, a new Gmail feature was spotted that checks if the PGP signature attached to a message is valid. The following was spotting in Gmail recently:

So Google is playing around with public key cryptography to provide a method for employing digital signatures. Digital signatures enable the recipient of information to verify the authenticity of the information’s origin, and also verify that the information is intact. Sweet… if Google does this, digital signatures for the masses! Google has been pumping out new Labs features at a furious pace lately… hopefully we can expect to see this very soon!

To see code snippets and read more check out Google Operating System.

Gmail could suprpass Hotmail’s numbers in 2009. Between September 2007 and September 2008, Gmail’s visitor total grew 39%, from 18.8 million to 26 million, ComScore figures indicate. Windows Live Hotmail during this period saw its visitor share decline 4%, from 46.2 million to 44.6 million.

Between December 2007 and December 2008, Gmail’s number of unique monthly visitors in the United States grew 43%, from 20.8 million to 29.6 million, according to ComScore. Windows Live Hotmail lost 5% of its unique monthly visitors during this period, falling from 45.7 million to 43.5 million.

If Google’s Gmail growth rate rises to, say, 46% over 2009, it could reach approximately 43 million unique U.S. visitors by the end of the year. And if Windows Live Hotmail continues to bleed visitors at a rate of, say, 3%, it will finish the year with around 42 million unique visitors per month.

Given all the recent announcements that Google has been making, all the new Google Labs features being pushed into Gmail, etc… Google seems poised to overtake Hotmail.

LifeHacker is reporting that Google is finally enabling Google Gears support in GMail. The first question you might ask is “what the heck is Google Gears”? Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:
Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance

So when Gears is enabled you can access your Gmail from your browser any time… even when you’re not online! Essentially, Offline Gmail uses Google Gears to download all (ok not ALL, but MOST) of your email to your desktop. When you use Gmail in offline mode it works exactly the same as using it normally—except that when offline mode is enabled in your browser, Gmail is that much faster. When you compose an email in offline mode they get put in your outbox, and those emails are automatically sent once you’re back online.

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Bummer. If you were raring to play around with the new send-to-SMS chat feature in Gmail Labs, you’ll have to wait a little longer.

On Friday, one of Gmail’s product managers, Leo Dirac, posted on the official Gmail blog that a last-minute glitch has resulted in the feature being pulled back for further testing. The glitch, which Dirac says should take about two weeks to fix, would keep the two-way communication feature from turning on all the way, keeping replies from making it back to you.

When the process is working properly you’re able to send SMS contacts a message just like you would if they were online. The system would also keep their responses in the same chat window, making it a simple resource for staying in touch even when you or your contacts are not online at the same time.