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

Posted by Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager

When we published the Gmail tips guide in July, we promised it would help you become a Gmail ninja. Now, if you want to become a Gmail ниндзя or 忍者, you can do that too: these tips are now available in Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and UK English.

We’ve also added a handful of new tips to the English site, culled from suggestions you submitted. Some of the new tricks to help manage your email efficiently include sending and receiving mail from multiple addresses, adding formatting to chat messages, and selecting multiple messages at once using shift-select. Thanks to everyone who submitted ideas, and please keep them coming.

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More ninja tips in more languages

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

Posted by Ian Whitfield, Software Engineering Intern

People keep track of lots of things in their Google Calendars — meetings, business trips, due dates and conference calls. But when I started my summer internship at Google, I wondered why it wasn’t easier to add calendar events for the fun stuff in life, like birthdays and sports schedules.

Now, when you look under “Other Calendars,” click “Add,” then “Browse Interesting Calendars,” you’ll find calendars for hundreds of teams in dozens of sports leagues — everything from the National Football League to the Korean FA Cup.

When you subscribe to your favorite team’s calendar, you’ll see every game listed, updated in real time with the score as the game progresses.

You can also subscribe to a “Contacts’ Birthdays and Events” calendar, which will add all of your contacts’ birthdays to Google Calendar. Data is pulled from your Gmail contacts and your friends’ Google profiles.

Finally, we also have two new Calendar Labs features for you to check out: “Dim future repeating events” makes recurring meetings more transparent over time, helping more important meetings pop out, and “Add any gadget by URL” gives you the flexibility put any gadget you’d like in your calendar.

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New in Calendar: Sports schedules and contacts’ birthdays

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

Posted by Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager

Have you ever clicked the “Reader” link at the top of your Gmail inbox and ended up in Google Reader, kind of unsure about what to do next?

We realize this happens from time to time, so to help people get started with Reader, we asked a bunch of prominent journalists, techies, fashion critics, and foodies for their lists of favorite sites and blogs. We compiled their reading lists and made them accessible to everyone at google.com/powerreaders, where you can explore and subscribe to lists from Thomas Friedman, Arianna Huffington, Paul Krugman, the editors of Lifehacker, Boing Boing, Kottke.org, and many more.

Whether you’re new to Google Reader or already have an extensive reading list, we hope this will be a good place to find great stuff to read. And if you want to create your own reading list to share with others, you can do that too.

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Find great stuff to read in Google Reader

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

Posted by Benjamin Grol, Product Manager

When composing messages, you probably rely pretty heavily on auto-complete to add recipients. Auto-complete is convenient and fast, and usually does the trick. But sometimes seeing your list of contacts can help you remember all the people you want to include on your email. So, we’ve added a contact chooser to Gmail. Click the “To:” link (or Cc:/Bcc:) when composing a message and you’ll see something like this:

You can click on the contacts you want to add or search for others.

If you use contact groups, your groups will appear in a drop-down menu in the contact chooser, so you can select contacts from the groups you’ve already created. And if you happen to use Gmail in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, being able to pick from your list of contacts should be particularly useful since auto-complete doesn’t offer the same search as you type experience that it does in other languages.

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Composing a message? Try the contact chooser

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.

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More on today’s Gmail issue

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.

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Today’s Gmail problems

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

Posted by Michael Bolin, Software Engineer

Sometimes you need to get your tasks out of Tasks. Although you already know how I feel about paper, we decided to add support for printing with Tasks’s graduation from Gmail Labs. Today we’re offering another export solution which doesn’t kill trees: emailing a task list.

Like most Tasks features, “Email task list” can be found in the Actions menu.

Clicking on it will open a new compose window with the contents of your current task list. This works in all views (my order, sort by date, completed), so to email your mom to explain why you’ve been so busy and haven’t been able to return her calls, just choose “View completed tasks” from the Actions menu, then “Email task list” and send away. (Note: this may not be very convincing if you haven’t actually checked anything off your list recently.)

If you want to let us know how Tasks is working for you, we’re now available on Twitter at http://twitter.com/googletasks. Like most Google accounts on Twitter, we won’t be able to respond to every question or feature request, but sometimes you might get lucky and we’ll have an answer for you. Oh and @sayanghosh, today is your lucky day.

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Email a task list

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

Posted by Marcin Brodziak, Software Engineer

A few months ago, we added the ability to import your old mail and contacts to Gmail. We made this feature available for all newly-created Gmail accounts first, since people new to Gmail benefit most from being able to move their stuff with them. Friends who wanted to use Gmail but kept telling us how painful it would be finally made the switch!

But many old time Gmail users (including us) also have old accounts lurking. Often, these accounts predate Gmail, and occasionally we have to log into them to look at some old confirmation email or find the email address for someone with whom we’ve lost touch.

Now, with just a few clicks anyone can copy all of that to your Gmail account. It’s easy — just go to the Settings > Accounts & Import page and click “Import mail and contacts.” A window will pop out to lead you through the short import process. If you want us to continue to forward any new mail your other account gets for 30 days, we can do that too.

Copying mail over usually takes a couple days, occasionally up to a week — but eventually it all arrives. And once it’s done, you can forget your old account and enjoy having everything in one place.

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Mail and contact import for everyone