Get notified when someone suspecious logs into your Gmail account

There were so many instances which kept on proving vulnarabilities of Gmail. Many people on Orkut lost their account including my cousin due to this vulnurablities. In most of the cases it’s hard to get back your account. My friend Parashuram, who is also an Open Social developer has created a widget/gadget which keeps looking at the activities on your Gmail account & notifies whenever something suspecious happens. To use this Gmail Burglar Alarm application, you should first enable labs feature “Add any gadget by URL” by going to “Settings–>Labs–>Add any gadget by URL”. After enabling it, goto “Gadgets” tab under Settings & add gadget from URL “http://gmailids.appspot.com/gids.xml“. You can view much detailed video demonstration on adding this application/gadget into your gmail account here.

The gadget sits in your gmail sidebar & keeps tracking login/logout time, browser, OS, IP …etc. The gadget creates two calendars inside your google account, one to keep track of all the activities on your account & the other to send notification SMS when something suspecious happens. Interesting fact about this gadget is, it uses Google calendar to send SMS! Since gadget makes use of your calendars to keep the data, all the data remains with you.

Limitations:

Though this is one of the steps you can take to avoid hackers getting into your account, this can’t be ultimate. This gadget has few limitations. Gmail Burglar Alarm tracks logins only from web browsers. Can’t track logins from other applications like Gmail Mobile client, Mail Clients like thunderbird or from mobile browser.

Disclaimer:

Be careful while adding these kind of gadgets into your gmail account. Add them only from trusted sources. Gmail Burglar Alarm gadget is made with good intentions in mind. But similar gadget can also be made to steal your account password!

Headover to Parashuram’s blog to know more & install this security gadget.

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Gmail Labs has released a new feature called “Offline Gmail” as announced on official gmail blog. Offline gmail uses Google Gears to download all your emails to system cache when you are connected to network. Offline Gmail keeps syncing the local cache with server when connected. When you are offline, turn browser into “Offline Mode” by going to “File–>Work Offline” & visit gmail.com as usual. All the emails will be accessible as usual.

To enable this feature goto “Settings–>Labs” & enable “Offline Gmail”. You might have also required to install Google Gears to get this functioning. This feature is not yet released to all accounts yet, but will be releasing soon. Keep looking at your Setings page.

Let me first tell you what is Push Email, you will receive email as soon a new email is received by the mail server, just like SMS. To use this service you need IMAP or POP access to your mail server & also your mail server should support anyone of them. With POP access you can download your emails to phone, but server & phone will not be in sync. For ex: if you delete a mail on your phone, it will be still there in server. IMAP is more advanced which syncs both mail boxes. Whatever you do on any place, gets reflected everywhere. Thankfully Gmail provides IMAP access for all the accounts, you have to enable it by going to “Settings–>Forwarding & POP/IMAP”. Basic GPRS plans like Airtel Live & Vodafone Live doesn’t provide IMAP access, you have to activate Airtel Mobile Office & or Vodafone Mobile Connect.

Configuring on Phone:

This configuration is for Phones which come up with inbuilt mail client, if your phone doesn’t have that try using gmail mobile app available at http://m.google.com.

Open email client on your phone, goto “Settings–>Add new email” & configure as mentioned below:

Incoming Mail Server:
Email/user ID: Your Gmail ID
Password: Gmail Password
Incoming Mail Server: imap.google.com
Mailbox name: Gmail (you can use anyting)
Mailbox Type: IMAP4
Security Ports: SSL
Port: 993 or Default in some phones

Outgoing Mail Server:
Email/user ID: Your Gmail ID
Password: Gmail Password
Outgoing Mail Server: smtp.google.com
Security Ports: SSL/TSL
Port: 465 or 587 or Default in some phones

After configuration connect to your mailbox, now you wil receive emails as soon as they arrive!

Many of us use gmail because of it’s simple design & featureset it has to offer us. Google has introduced a new security feature for gmail, remote lagout. Many of use more than two computers to login to gmail. If you take my example, I login to gmail from home & office. Some times we often leave the browser opened & not being logged out of gmail, if the computer is at office or any public place your account might be mis-used. Now sitting at home computer you can logout of gmail in office computer or any other computer.

Footer in gmail contains your session details, when you last logged in & from which IP.

You can click on “Details” link which shows you a pop-up having details about your last sessions.

Check for all the sessions, see all are yours or somebody else is logging into your account! Click on “Sign out all other sessions” to sign out of gmail at all other places exept the current.

Bored up looking at same old interface from years, time to give web your colors! Stylish is a Firefox extension which enables you to change the look & feel of a web site. I got to know about this at Barcamp Bangalore from The100rabh a fellow Blog-a-lorean. If you take example of Gmail, it has the same interface from the day one. Though slighter changes were made in adding functionalities like chat inside email, there were no changes made in color scheme & look/feel.

Stylish enables you to define your own stylesheet for a website. But for writing a stylesheet of your own, you should be having knowledge of CSS. Hey, don’t stop reading! there are lot of ready stylesheets for many websites, which you can just load into Stylish. Stylesheets are available at http://userstyles.org

Procedure to install Stylish & load new stylesheet:

• Install Firefox if you don’t have from getfirefox.com
• Install extension Stylish for firefox from addons.firefox.com
• Browse available stylesheets at http://userstyles.org & load stylesheets you want
• That’s it!! start re-designing the web!

To give you an example how stylish can change a web site, I am posting couple of screenshots of Gmail after loading awesome stylesheet Gmail Re-Designed.

Google has released Google talk labs edition with lot of new features. The most awaited group chat is implemented in this labs edition. Group chat was implemented on gmail web chat app few months ago, but it’s desktop application was lacking this feature. Following are new features found on Google talk labs edition:

• Group chat, have conferences in Gtalk desktop labs edition. I used to log in to Yahoo! for this feature before.
• Notification from other Google services orkut & calendar.
• Tabbed chatting, no hassle of new chat window, chat with different friends in different tabs.

There are also few things which I don’t like in this new client:

• Installation is different from previous client, is pretty similar to Yahoo! messenger. First downloads a 300kb installer, upon executing that will download other required files to install application. This installer may not work at office, because they might be blocking the port through which installer tries to connect to server.
• One more much awaited feature “Invisible Mode” is not yet implemented.
• Copying of text from chat window is not possible! This looks really annoying for me.

You can get Google Talk labs edition here. This is the labs edition, you can click on “Feedback” button present at bottom of application to send your feedback about the application & to improve next Google talk release.

After making orkut open for all few days before, now google made its move to make Gmail available for all. Now anyone can sign up without invitation.Check out the screen shots:

Google has newly included mail fetcher in Gmail. With this you can read mails from other email IDs.This might be helpful to those who are using many email ids. You can see all your emails at one place. go to http://mail.google.com/support/ and follow instruction given.But it still not activated for many accounts (including mine). Hope google will make it available for all users soon

Everyone knows Gmail has launched its mobile version many months back.Unfortunately its
not working on many mobiles in India.In my Nokia 6030 handset with “Airtel Online” GPRS connection it shows error as “Secure connection not available”.I don’t know whether it may work on other handsets or connection.But still there is a way to access gmail on your mobile. Point your phone browser to http://gmobile.sayni.net & login to gmail!
This is a wap site which provides gmail mobile feature & is not official gmail mobile.
You can see only text of the email.You cant access attachments & pictures in a mail.
It almost works on any GPRS enabled handset world wide.
Requirements:
1) GPRS enabled handset.
2) Active GPRS connection. Should have access to all wap sites ex:Airtel Online connection
free GPRS connection doesn’t allow you to enter this site.Click Here to see procedure to activate
GPRS connection.

You can add emotions in Gmail chat,
List of emotions are present at
Gmail Help.