Results

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Andy Palay, Software Engineer

One of the most requested features for Offline Gmail has been the ability to include attachments in messages composed while offline. Starting today, attachments work just the way you would expect them to whether you are online or offline (with the exception that when you’re offline you won’t be able to include inline images). Just add the attachment and send your message.

If you have Offline Gmail enabled, you’ll notice that all your mail now goes through the outbox, regardless of whether you’re online or offline. This allows Gmail to capture all attachments, even if you suddenly get disconnected from network. If you’re online, your mail will quickly be sent along to its destination.

If you haven’t tried offline access yet, visit the Labs tab and follow these instructions to get started:

1. Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
2. Click Save Changes.
3. After your browser reloads, you’ll see a new “Offline” link in the upper righthand corner of the Gmail page, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don’t already have it.

Now that you can send attachments while offline, we’d love to see pictures of you using Gmail in unusual places while you’re disconnected from the web. Pictures of you using Gmail in an airplane, igloo, or submarine are all welcome. Email your photo to hikingfan@gmail.com and we’ll post the most interesting ones here.

Original post: 
Send attachments while offline

Official Gmail News

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Chad Yoshikawa, Software Engineer

Gmail chat status (those green, orange, and red bubbles) indicates if your friends are online or not. But sometimes my buddies appear green when they’re not really “online online” — they just have chat open on their Android phones.

Turn on Green Robot, a new experiment in Gmail Labs, and you’ll see a robot icon next to people who are currently using Android phones. In the case below, Shirley is online with Android, Nicolle R. is using regular Gmail chat, and Chris I. is currently away but also on Android. Slatka is not an angry robot — she’s online with Android but currently busy.

These icons can help you decide whether to tailor your conversation to the type of device that your chat buddy is using. For example, when you know the guy on the other end is using his Android phone, you may decide to send shorter, more concise chat messages.

When your chat buddies log into Gmail, their presence icons will revert to the traditional red, green, and orange status bubbles. In addition, if your chat buddy happens to be logged into both Gmail and Android chat then the traditional Gmail status icons will be shown. Try it out and let us know what you think.

More here:
New in Labs: Green robot icon

Official Gmail News

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Elvin Lee, Software Engineer

When Gmail launched five years ago, it came with a gigabyte of storage space. A gigabyte doesn’t seem like very much any more, and now every Gmail account comes with more than seven gigs of space (and growing). Still, some people manage to use up all of this (that’s a lot of email…), so for over two years we’ve offered the option to purchase even more storage. This extra storage acts as an overflow that you only start using when you reach the limit of your free storage, and is shared for use between Gmail and Picasa Web Albums. Picasa has always come with a gigabyte of free storage to share photos, but people need even more storage as they start taking more pictures and moving full resolution backups of their photo collection into the cloud.

While storage costs have been dropping naturally, we’ve also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce costs even further. Today, we’re dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage more affordable. You can now buy 20 GB for only $5 a year, twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera. And if you need more than 20 GB, you can purchase up to 16 terabytes!

So if you’re running out of space in your overflowing inbox, or want to keep full resolution copies of thousands of photos, visit www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage to see all the plans and to buy more storage.

View original here: 
More extra storage for less

Official Gmail News

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Maria Khomenko, Software Engineer

Like an increasing number of people these days, I like to stay productive during my flights (even those without wifi access). A long flight is a perfect opportunity to go through everything in my inbox and catch up on older mail. I use Offline Gmail in Gmail Labs to access my mail while disconnected. However, up until now, Offline Gmail heuristically picked which messages get downloaded for offline use. This meant that sometimes not enough mail from my Inbox would be available, but the Chat logs that I certainly didn’t need on the flight would be there.

From now on, once you enable Offline Gmail from the Labs tab under Settings, you can choose which messages get downloaded. On the Offline tab under Settings, you’ll see your current settings and be able to set how much mail you want to download from each of your labels. I chose to download everything in my Inbox and important labels, as well as recent messages from the last month from other labels.

When you hit save, Gmail will synchronize new messages you didn’t have downloaded before and remove the ones you’re not planning to read from your hard drive. You can always change your settings back to keep fewer or more messages later on — fewer messages means Offline Gmail runs faster. Questions or comments? Let us know!

Here is the original:
Choose which messages get downloaded for offline use

Official Gmail News

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Maria Khomenko, Software Engineer

Like an increasing number of people these days, I like to stay productive during my flights (even those without wifi access). A long flight is a perfect opportunity to go through everything in my inbox and catch up on older mail. I use Offline Gmail in Gmail Labs to access my mail while disconnected. However, up until now, Offline Gmail heuristically picked which messages get downloaded for offline use. This meant that sometimes not enough mail from my Inbox would be available, but the Chat logs that I certainly didn’t need on the flight would be there.

From now on, once you enable Offline Gmail from the Labs tab under Settings, you can choose which messages get downloaded. On the Offline tab under Settings, you’ll see your current settings and be able to set how much mail you want to download from each of your labels. I chose to download everything in my Inbox and important labels, as well as recent messages from the last month from other labels.

When you hit save, Gmail will synchronize new messages you didn’t have downloaded before and remove the ones you’re not planning to read from your hard drive. You can always change your settings back to keep fewer or more messages later on — fewer messages means Offline Gmail runs faster. Questions or comments? Let us know!

Excerpt from:
Choose which messages get downloaded for offline use

Official Gmail News

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Heaven Kim, Product Marketing Manager, Google Mobile

Back in April, we released a new version of Gmail for mobile, re-designed to be faster, more usable, and offer basic offline support on iPhone and Android devices. The improvements we made to its underlying architecture have made it possible for us to rapidly release new features and further improve performance since then.

Over the last six months, we’ve added a lot: mute, label management, keyboard shortcuts, smart links, an outbox, and the ability to move messages (label and archive in one step). Some new features, like swipe-to-archive and auto-expanding compose boxes, take advantage of these mobile phones’ unique properties. We also made address auto-complete faster, enhanced refresh capabilities, and sped up loading so Gmail for mobile starts in under three seconds on newer smartphones.

We’ll continue to add more functionality —and there’s no need to download or update anything as long as you have iPhone/iPod touch OS 2.2.1 or above or are using an Android-powered device. Just go to gmail.com from your mobile browser as you do on your PC. To make it easy to access your Gmail account, try creating a home screen link.

Read more:
What’s new with Gmail on iPhone and Android

Official Gmail News

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Ben Treynor, VP Engineering and Site Reliability Czar

Gmail’s web interface had a widespread outage earlier today, lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there’s a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such. We’ve already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we’re currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.

Here’s what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn’t in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail’s web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.

However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!”. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.

The Gmail engineering team was alerted to the failures within seconds (we take monitoring very seriously). After establishing that the core problem was insufficient available capacity, the team brought a LOT of additional request routers online (flexible capacity is one of the advantages of Google’s architecture), distributed the traffic across the request routers, and the Gmail web interface came back online.

What’s next: We’ve turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn’t happen again. Some of the actions are straightforward and are already done — for example, increasing request router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom. Some of the actions are more subtle — for example, we have concluded that request routers don’t have sufficient failure isolation (i.e. if there’s a problem in one datacenter, it shouldn’t affect servers in another datacenter) and do not degrade gracefully (e.g. if many request routers are overloaded simultaneously, they all should just get slower instead of refusing to accept traffic and shifting their load). We’ll be hard at work over the next few weeks implementing these and other Gmail reliability improvements — Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users, and we’re committed to keeping events like today’s notable for their rarity.

Go here to read the rest: 
More on today’s Gmail issue

Official Gmail News

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by David Besbris, Engineering Director

Update (2:37 pm): We’ve fixed the issue, and Gmail should be back up and running as usual. We’re still investigating the root cause of this outage, and we’ll share more information soon. Thanks for bearing with us.

We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now — we are too, and we definitely feel your pain. We don’t usually post about minor issues here (the Apps status dashboard and the Gmail Help Center are usually where this kind of information goes). Because this is impacting so many of you, we wanted to let you know we’re currently looking into the issue and hope to have more info to share here shortly. If you have IMAP or POP set up already, you should be able to access your mail that way in the meantime. We’re terribly sorry for the inconvenience and will get Gmail back up and running as soon as possible.

Go here to read the rest: 
Today’s Gmail problems

Official Gmail News