Gmail went down currently today at 5:20am EST and it is still not up. People are tweeting about the Gmail outage and suddenly “gmail” has become one of the most tweeted word on twitter.

IMAP and POP3 are working pretty fine and peopse using Google talk clients can talk to their friends without any problem. This seems like a serious issue because Gmail is down for about an hour. We have also witmessed the 404 error on Gmail.

We have been trying to load Gmail since the outage and some strange contacts started to appear in the Aditi’s Gmail account.

Gmail has introduces one more Lab feature which is poised to help all those GMail addicts who have their lives intertwined with data on Gmail. The feature of Multiple Inboxes to a large extent diminishes the need to open more than two Gmail windows open on your web browser. The multiple inboxes allows you to see at most 5 Gmail window panes of user configured email types alongside the inbox.

This new feature has to be enabled by going in the Labs section which can be accessed by clicking on “Settings” In the Gmail Labs you will have to enable the “Multiple Inboxes” by Vivi.

The new lists of threads can be labels, your starred messages, drafts or any search you want, configurable under Settings. You can configure in the Multiple Inboxes settings about what emails or chats you wish to see in a particular pane. If you wish to see “starred emails” in one of your window pane then write “is:starred” against the pane window option in Multiple Inboxes Settings without the quotations. Similarly you can put “is:drafts” “is:chats: “has:attachment” etc.

It’s remarkable that hardly a day goes by when Google doesn’t make any news and most of the times times these news come in the form of improvements in their services. It’s hard to believe that in spite of the superiority of Google products notably Gmail, they are still in beta.

This one is dedicated to all our Indian readers who love to spend hours in front of their computers chatting with their friends day long in Gmail. Chatting is fun but there are times when you have to say something in native Hindi or Tamil for that matter which if written in English loses the punch. It doesn’t remain the same after that.

It is thus recommended that you transliterate the english text in to hindi which would require you to go to the Google India Transliteration site. You can however use one add-on which adds Google’s Transliteration functionality to text area and input boxes.

This small extension is particularly helpful when you wish to talk in Hindi or other Indian languages like Tamil, Telugu, Kannadda and Malyalam. This extension works like a breeze and the inspite of my pre-assumptions it didn’t screwed the words. Just five minutes of practice seems enough to get acquainted to this thing.
If you one of the few Zoho users then it might interest you that This Firefox extensions supports Zoho chat as well.

Gmail is completely in a transformation mode. We gave seen Gmail introducing new features almost every week and now Google has also added themes. There have been attempts at skinning gmail earlier but they were not as respnsive as many of us would have liked. Users could change their gmail by installing the Better Gmail extension which comes wih few themes but I never found them too tempting to use.

Now that Google has added some themes for Gmail, then my moron friends who are still on AOL or some other “all-fancy-nothing-beneath-the-hood” email services have suddenly realized that Gmail is not that bad afterall. Oh really.

There are handful of themes that has been introduced in Gmail and I am using the one called Desk for the time being, although I would love to show off the one called Terminal.

You can access the themes by clicking Settings>Themes. If you can’t see the new Themes tab then you might have to give it some more time as most of my frioends haven’t been able to get the new look as of yet.

Google has finally introduced video chatting in Gmail allowing users to talk face to face without having to punch in the keyboard to communicate. Gmail users who are using Windows xp or Vista or even Mac can now expand their chats to include live audio and video with their contacts.

Google is offering browser based voice and video chat as an extension to Web mail and instant messaging which is quite different to what was served by the Gmail’s competitors. You gotta download IM clients of Yahoo, MSN and Skype to do video calling.

The features requires a pluginwhich is available for both PC and MAC OX . The Linux users will have to wait for some tie before they can have this feature. In order to use the video or voice chat, PC users will need Windows XP or higher, and Mac users will need an Intel-based machine running at least OS 10.4.

You can download the plugin from the Gmail’s site.

Gmail has just introduced support for Gadgets which you can enable by going in Settings>Labs. This development implies two things, one that Google is now planning to do with Gmail what it couldn’t with iGoogle and the other thing being Google’s permissiveness to accept outsider gadgets into its one of the most used and loved web service. Either way, its great for users like us. You can now do whole lot of things by adding gadgets and make Gmail more

Google has put a cap of five gadgets at the time so you need to be picky about what gadget really solves your purpose. There is not much information out there on web on how to add these gadgets. Let me kick start on how to add these gadgets.

You can add gadgets once you enable the Gadget Labs feature which you can find at Settings>Labs. After enabling it, you will have a new tab called “Gadgets” in the “Settings” besides ‘Labs.” You just have to put in the URL of the gadget and if it’s valid then this gadget will start appearing on the sidebar of Gmail.

The interesting part starts now because finding the URL of gadgets is not very easy for the majority of users. So here I put in the link of certain Gadgets which will help you to transcend your Gmail quite a few inches above in the Productivity or just Fun Index.

Gadget URL’s for Gmail:

Twitter Gadget: It could not have started with any other but Twitter, You can have Twitter feeds and post tweets right from your Gmail with this gadget.

Gadget URL:  http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/106092714974714025177/TwitterGadget.xml

Digg Gadget: This Digg gadget does let you browse the popular stories across the topics.

Gadget URL: http://digg.com/goog/ig.xml

FriendFeed Gadget: Some gadgets will take you to their homepage like this when you add them, but be assured that happens usually the first time when you install.

Gadget URL:  http://friendfeed.com/embed/googlegadget/spec

Top News Gadget: This News gadget collects stories from CNN, NY Time, Fox News, Reuters etc.

Gadget URL: http://www.labpixies.com/campaigns/news/news.xml

Online TV: You can also watch online TV on your Gmail with this gadget. Must check out the E Music channel on this one.

Gadget URL: http://www.labpixies.com/campaigns/tv/tv.xml

Tech Blogs Gadget: This gadget collects feeds from top tech blogs like TechCrunch, Engadter, Gizmodo and also Slashdot.

Gadget URL: http://www.labpixies.com/campaigns/top_blogs/tech_blogs.xml

TO-DO list gadget: It would be wise to keep a to-do list gadget on Gmail as well so that you atleast have an idea about what you have to do before you will procrastinate.

Gadget URL: http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/117966707807588406411/todo.xml

Delicious Gadget: You can also keep your delicious bookmarks in your Gmail with this gadget.

Gadget URL: http://www.labpixies.com/campaigns/delicious/delicious.xml

Last.fm Radio Gadget: This gadget will let you listen to live music from Last.fm. My best gadget so far.

Gadget URL: http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/105048095583033371706/player.xml

Basically guys, most gadgets will have the extension of .xml so you can find hundreds of other gadgets as well from different sources. The gadgets I mentioned are all supported on Gmail and I have tested each of them. I didn’t included the ones which were causing trouble. I hope that would be enough to get you starting and if you need to know more then just ping me.

  We blogged about some Greasemonkey scripts which lets you add GMail Reader and Google Calendar into your Gmail space. It seems that Google itself wants to incorporated those features natively into Gmail. Google has announced two new lab features which now allows you to add gadgets of Google Calendar and Google Docs into Gmail.

Both the features can be enabled by going into Settings>Labs. We would love to have such widget for Google Reader and if we go by the records we know they will do it pretty soon.

 

If you happen to have more than gmail accounts then the accessing all of them at the same time is real trouble. You can obviously log into multiple gmail accounts on the same computer using different web browsers but many of us don’t like to do that. This problem is caused by the particular behaviour of web browsers to store the cookie of webpage that you visit. Whenever you log into gmail it stores a cookie corresponding to that site and when you try to log into gmail again then the same cookie is processed by the browser and you get to don’t get to open another gmail account in the same web browser.

The Incognito mode in Google Chrome however lets you simultaneously log into Gmail accounts because every tab functions independently from the other tab in it. But most of us like to use Firefox, so an extension called CookiePie is what we need. This particular Firefox plugin enables you to maintain different cookies storage in different tabs and windows thus keeping every single tab independent from the other.

We believe that once Firefox embraces p0rn mode, then we might not have to use this extension. Till then, use it and happy browsing.

I don’t call myself an emoticon literate but I know people who do all their chatting with those cute looking characters. Gmail has quietly added some more emoticons for its online chat in the browser. The new squarish emoticons are not as refined as their previous emoticons but some more never hurt.

The mobile team of Gmail has announced yesterday, that there is a new version of Gmail for mobile v2.0 application for J2ME-supported and BlackBerry phones. The Gmail for mobile 2.0 has been designed to be faster and more reliable in low signal areas and to support basic offline access on phones like the Nokia N95, Sony Ericsson W910i, and BlackBerry Curve.
The new Gmail client has a number of new features like Multiple accounts management andMultiple mobile email drafts that will make it easier to access the gmail account. However the main features of new version of Gmail are the shortcut keys on QWERTY handsets and the basic offline support.

You can access Gmail on your mobile at m.google.com/mail