Here is your chance to win a brilliant Design by Humans t-shirt of your choice. For a limited time only I will randomly select a winner who will get to choose a t-shirt of his/her choice from Design by Humans if you subscribe to my Web Technology feed by email.

All you have to do is enter your email address in the box below and click on subscribe. You will receive an email from Feedburner which requires confirmation. If you subscribe and confirm before 25th December 2008, you will be entered into the contest to win a Design by Humans t-shirt.

I will announce the winner on Christmas day and the t-shirt will be shipped to the winner once a design and size is selected. So subscribe and win!

Design by Humans

When I login to my GMail this morning, I saw a red link “Share a GMail story” at the top of the page. Google gets stories from GMail users and they pin the stories on the office walls but now they are asking GMail users to express those GMail stories in a video and post it on YouTube. I watched a few of the GMail video stories on YouTube. All stories speak well of the GMail product. Here is one about GMail that sums up the reason why we use GMail and how it is widely used around the world. Worth a watch.

When I login to my GMail this morning, I noticed a new featured on the top right of my IE7 browser. Google has released a new feature in GMail – coloured labels for emails.

Previously you can label all your emails and you can only label them in green. Now you can choose different colours for different labels. It enhances the visibility by providing different choice of colours for labels. Unfortunately this feature is only available for IE7 and Firefox 2 browsers. I use IE7 browser at work but when I am at home I use Safari on my Apple computer and the feature is not available.

Gmail was released in 2004, making history by giving away 1GB of email storage.  It was also one of the first web application that used AJAX.  That sparked off the email war between Google, Yahoo and Hotmail to provide AJAX type web email applications. 

Since the successful release of Gmail, we have been anticipating a release of a greater and better Gmail.  Gmail 2.0 is now being rolled out to selected users and eventually to all Gmail users.  The Gmail 2.0 architecture has an improved performance and usability.  I read that the Javascript has been re-written to make GMail perform faster.  It's reported that some of the goodies you will get in Gmail 2.0 are mail prefetching and updated contact manager.  I've yet to see how it works.  I am waiting patiently for GMail 2.0.  You can have a preview at http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/10/gmails-new-version-is-now-available.html

Rumour has it that Google is integrating IMAP into GMail but it is not available to all GMail users yet. Only select few users have IMAP in GMail. I believe if this is true, Google is doing their bit of testing before releasing IMAP to all.

IMAP over POP3

POP3 sucks all emails from server to client. IMAP maintains a copy of the email on the server. This has benefits over POP3 in the sense that if you are not at a desktop to retrieve your email, a copy is always on the server and you can use a web client to look at your email. Most ISPs use POP3 over IMAP because it is easier to maintain and there is less issue of hard disk storage for growing mailboxes.

I will be listening to the net and will update this once I hear anything more certain about GMail IMAP.

A new worm, code-name Evaman is bogging down popular-email services, i.e. Hotmail and Yahoo. Symantec has reported that his worm could be as dangerous as the MyDoom virus.

Evaman sends an attachment to PC Users with headings like “Failed Transaction” or “Delivery Failure”. Evaman has the potential to take control over Win 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, NT and Win Server 2003.

Full story…

Originally posted on 2 July 2004

Google has updated the program policy for GMail this week by adding clauses that ban the sale, trading, reselling or exploiting of GMail accounts for commercial purposes.
Originally posted on 2 July 2004

GMail and Blogger users that have been given free GMail accounts have been cashing in on the scarcity of GMail accounts by selling them to anyone who is willing to pay. You can find many GMail accounts for sale on E-Bay.

Since the new clause has been added, we are still uncertain what action Google will take to police GMail accounts and whether it will confiscate or close accounts that flout the policy change.

For full story, click here.

Originally posted on 30 June 2004

Yahoo’s new paid e-mail service will give a user 2GB of storage for £11.99 a year.

To compete with GMail, Hotmail will increase free emails storage to 250MB and 2GB for paid accounts in July reported by BBC.

Webmail facts gathered from BBC website.

Gmail – 1GB storage, 10MB attachments
Hotmail Plus – $19.95 per year, 2GB storage, 20MB attachments
Hotmail free – 250MB storage, 10MB attachments
Yahoo Mail Plus – £11.99, 2GB storage, 10MB attachments
Yahoo Free – 100MB of storage, 10MB attachments
Lycos UK Personal – £41.88 per year, 1GB storage, 50MB attachments
Lycos UK – free, 10MB storage
Spymac – free, 1GB storage
Ask Jeeves – free, 250MB storage
Ask Jeeves Excite Gold – $19.99 per year, 2GB storage
Shiremail – £42 per year, 1GB storage