Google has launched a new way to authorize and login with your credentials without actually logging in with password or keyboard onto any PC. It’s called Sesame.

How Google Gmail Sesame Authentication Works

It’s simple: Remote Autherization from your mobile. You personal mobile device’s browser is already logged-In with your Google credentials.

Step 1. Go ahead and Open http://accounts.google.com/sesame on the desktop browser where you need to access your gmail / google account.

Step 2. Launch your barcode scanner and scan the QR code that appears on /sesame. You’ll be asked to authenticate the PC for access to your Google / Gmail account.

You’ll automagically be logged into the Desktop PC. Remote authorization at its best!

Related: Make your Gmail UnHackable, Hacker proof.

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Your Gmail account, your photos, your private documents—if you reuse the same password on multiple sites and one of those sites gets hacked, or your password is conned out of you directly through a phishing scam, it can be used to access some of your most closely-held information. Gmail had gone https a year ago, and then OAuth, but that may not be enough if you are careless.

How to Prevent Gmail from Being Hacked

First things first, you should have a long and good password that cannot be memorized by any other person. A combination of a phrase and numbers, special characters is a perfect thing to do. Beyond that, chose a password recovery that you believe no one else can answer.

Beyond those basic preventions, Google has introduced a 2 step authentication, that makes your gmail account almost impossible to hack, almost. You can safely spread out your password and still have no risks of getting hacked, such is the beauty of 2 step authentication.

Go to Gmail’s settings > personal settings and enroll for 2step authentication. A user-friendly set-up wizard will guide you through the process, including setting up a backup phone and creating backup codes in case you lose access to your primary phone.

Once enabled, now on, you’ll see an extra page that prompts you for a code when you sign in to your account. You have 3 different otpions to get this code:

• get called by Google on your phone that will speak the code.
• Receive code via SMS
• Generate code yourself using a mobile application on your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone device.

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The feature, which Google confirmed it is testing on a select number of users, goes one big step beyond Google Suggest and provides streaming search results as-you-type.

Search Multiple Gmail accoutns, google Apps as you Type

If you are underwhelmed by what you ‘ve seen,  try this Firefox  / chrome Plugin created by a web startup company CloudMagic, that brings “Search as you type” to Gmail and Google Apps.

After Install, you get a new search box that lets you do things to your wildest imaginations. It allows you to rapidly search for anything in your inbox, Contacts, emails, phone numbers, keyword based searches, with results updating as you type and the ability to preview messages from a thread, without navigating away from your current Gmail page, it all works as a snap.

The first time you install the extension, you will have to giveaway your credentials for allt he accounts you wish to unify and search from CloudMagic. I know, even I’m uncomfortable doing that, but company promises on not misusing it.

The interface is appealing and brings True Multitasking to Gmail. Clean up all the clutter by practically working in a single tab. No longer will you have to open another tab to something extra.

Here’s a sneak peak on how to get started.

Download: Firefox /Chrome Extension

What’s Next with CloudMagic?

CloudMagic has bigger plans going further. They will soon be available with Google Docs, Hotmail, Yahoo & other cloud services.

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Unfortunately, most email providers don’t support any of such features and the end result is that you end-up relying upon a thrid party website that promises to do so, but lacks genuineness.

Don’t worry about it, Boomerang will help you get over this problem by integrating itself into Gmail. So, even if you use Google apps for your business, you can have the scheduled email going out from your official id. You don’t even have to be online in order to send your scheduled emails.

Boomerang is a plugin that fits beautifully into the default Gmail UI.  All you have to do is select the Boomerang tool and tell Boomerang when you need to see the message again as a reminder.

Scheduling Emails in Gmail: You can schedule your message to be sent at a destined Date & time, and don’t worry about time zones, it knows yours and others too.

You can set your schedules and then synchronize when you’re back on an Internet connection. Its automatic.

It uses OAuth to request permission in advance for sending emails using your gmail account. Still if you’re worried about security, Boomerang is very open about stating it:

Like most other Gmail plugins, we need access to the full email data to be able to move and send messages. In our queries, we only store the headers of the message (subject, sender, time) so that we can uniquely ID the message you want to schedule. We don’t store any message text.

Boomerang is currently is Beta, and is available on invite basis as  addons/extensions for Popular browsers: Chrome, Firefox 3.6+.

Taranfx readers can get it directly from the URL: Firefox Gmail, Chrome Gmail.

Also, signup for the extended Beta trial.

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Normally, when a user authorises a third party developer (e.g. Facebook) to see their contacts list, he has to give-out password which is a very insecure way of doing things especially when the 3rd part app is not as trustworthy.

Now with OAuth, users will be transparently able to login, share contacts, just like they do with Twitter accounts. The feature is now available to developers via the Google Code Labs website.

Most Google APIs support this OAuth standard, and starting today it is also available for the IMAP/SMTP feature of Gmail.

Google added that it was working with Yahoo! and Mozilla on a formal Internet standard for using OAuth with IMAP/SMTP.

The apps have started arrive,  The best example is the iPhone app: SmartPush – An Email client with push support based on OAuth on Gmail’s IMAP

While it is possible for a user to authorize this access by disclosing their Google Account password to the third party app, it is more secure for the app developer to use the industry standard protocol called OAuthwhich enables the user to give their consent for specific access without sharing their password. Most Google APIs support this OAuth standard, and starting today it is also available for the IMAP/SMTP feature of Gmail.

Google is next working with Mozilla (for thunderbird) and other companies to standardize this across email clients.

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Now, if it looks like something unusual is going on with your account, Gmail will alert you by posting a warning message saying, “Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…” along with the geographic region, as illustrated below:

In order to make this possible, Gmail keeps track of your frequently used IPs and then matches with a totally new one newly incurred. Apart fromt his, Gmail already featured list of IPs from which your account was last accessed. This info can be seen by clicking “show details” from the Footer of gmail page. It looks something like this:

Its always a good idea to change the password when you feel some unusual IP appears.

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The new Gmail Facebook Integration Chrome Extension lets you add “Facebook” right under the “Buzz”. And the Result is as seen below: (Shows Taranfx FanPage)

Currently, it’s pretty much limited on features but future updates would make it snappier.

Download

Taking it further, you can add a Google Gadget into GMail. You can enable this by going to  “Add any gadget by URL” into GMail Labs then add the following under “Gadgets” to  to get Facebook Chat, Alerts, Notification.

Here are the available Options:

1. Facebook – With Fullscreen view support (Gadget URL)
2. Facebook Chat (Gadget URL)
3. Facebook for iGoogle (Gadget URL)

You can play-around and choose the one that you like. And even Add Twitter in a similar way by using this gadget URL.

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It’s called Google Buzz. Works inside Gmail, Google homepage and via Phone and everything it does, it does pretty-neatly. The key stuff:

• Auto-Following
• Rich Fast sharing Experience
• Public, Private sharing
• Inbox Integration
• Just the good stuff

Works right in your Gmail under “Buzz”. The very first time you use it, it will auto-follow all your contacts. With time, it gets better, it will automatically predict based on your activity, the kind of content you want to see, and it makes sure you don’t miss it. It learns from your activity (things you ignore and mark important), and intelligently surprises you with new stuff. The clutter you see on facebook, won’t be seen here.

The features are Truly Killer! Say Good-bye to Facebook for sure. Twitter would still stay around.

Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.

Watch the Video to get a better idea:

Now, Google wants to take this to a new level in Mobile world. So that Social networks are aware of where exactly you are, and what kind of interaction would make sense for your friends.

New stuff for mobile:

• Available via Google.com
• Native iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile application “Buzz app”
• New Google Maps with Buzz.

It’s able to detect your current location and you get to see what people are buzzing about. For instance, if you are at a market and you want to know what’s buzzing near you, Google Buzz will help you. And via Maps you can see the buzz  around the world.

And it’s big on features, it’s kind of like Google Wave minus the boring stuff. So anything adding to timeline gets to life. e.g.a link posted gets images that you can select-out and post. Same goes with Videos, other media files.

Integration:

• Imports and Exports RSS feeds.
• Read only Twitter, Facebook Access
• Integrates with Pubshub
• Flickr
• Full Blown API – Google Code

Google has relied on services’ openness in order to build Buzz (you can connect Flickr and Twitter from Buzz in Gmail), and Buzz itself is not designed to be a closed system. The goal is to make Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. It’s built on suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API, and it’s all available on Google Code (for developers).

Available at http://www.google.com/buzz and http://buzz.google.com . It will appear in Gmail soon, depending upon your location.

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I don’t know about the readers, but I always used secure anyway. You can still move back to http, but that would be very unjustified.

Google was concerned about latency issues caused with https, that’s why it was never defaulted, but now Google seems to learn that security it the topmost thing we need.

Definitely this is triggered by High profile attack on Google from China. Google may leave china forever leaving a message for it’s worldwide users: “Security is our top most concern”.

Well, there’s a simple hack to get over it. For getting Multiple accounts logged in for any Web app, use a Firefox extension called Multifox. The addon will give a clean way of adding a new session in anew “Identity profile”.

“Each Multifox window is flagged with a number indicating the identity profile. Logins made in windows with different numbers are isolated. If you need to access 5 Gmail accounts you will need 5 windows with different identity profiles.

Here are the details of Features it packs up into  single addon:

• Logins are preserved the same way they are in “regular” windows. Even if you close the window or quit Firefox.
• The identity profile of each window is preserved when Firefox restores the session.
• New windows inherit the identity profile from the window they were opened from.
• Multifox begins from 2, because it considers 1 the “regular” Firefox identity profile.

Under the hood, it creates a separate workspace as if each was running under independent browser, keeping separate cookies for each.

And here’s tip for GTalk:

• First, create one copy of the Google Talk shortcut on your desktop – leave the original intact.
• Right click on this shortcut and choose Properties. The Target box will show you the path of the EXE for Google Talk – something like “C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe”
• Change this to: “C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe” /nomutex
  and hit OK.

What surprises us the most is this Irony — “some of the changes were meant to improve Gmail’s ability to stay online“.

But Google underestimated the load these changes would place on the routers when it took a relatively small number of servers offline for upgrades.

In a blog post on Tuesday night, Google said Tuesday’s outage lasted for about 100 minutes. And though it didn’t say what percentage of users were affected, it call the breakdown “a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such.” Judging from reports from Reg and the Tweetbook set, the outage was worldwide, and Google indicated in an earlier post to its Google Apps Status dashboard that a “majority” of users were affected.

This morning Pacific time, Google took “a small fraction” of its Gmail servers offline for routine upgrades, and this put an unexpected load on its request routers. “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,” reads the post form Ben Treynor, the Google vp of engineering who calls himself Site Reliability Czar.

“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.”

This meant that who knows how many people were unable to access Gmail via the web – though the service was still available via POP and IMAP. Boasting that the Gmail engineering team was alerted to the problem within seconds – “we take monitoring very seriously” – the company solved the issue by bringing more request routers online. Service was restored at about 2:10pm Pacific.

Google says it will now increase its request router capacity well beyond peak demand – and make some additional tweaks to its infrastructure. “For example,” Treynor says, “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.”

According to Treynor, Google has turned its “full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn’t happen again.”

UPDATE: Gmail is back up and running. With a Total down time exceeding an Hour.

I see, people panicking on Twitter. GMail being down, puts Twitter going down into perspective.

Every single second GMail goes down, I stop breathing. It’s so hard to live without GMail.
This is what you get — 502 Error.

Twitter users are sending 1000s of Tweets on GMail, I belive even Twitter could go down. A simple search gives 1000s new results on every refresh

It shouldn’t be a BIG problem on Google’s side of things since POP/IMAP mail still works. Right now I’m using it on iPhone, it’s working pretty normal. And it happened, Twitter went Over capacity several times already.

I’m off to oxygen masks.

UPDATE: Google Responds -

We’re aware that people are having trouble accessing Gmail. We’re working on fixing it. Apologies for the inconvenience http://bit.ly/31kL4B

Google Apps have all Matured. No longer are Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Talk carrying the beta tag. they are all now full-fledged members of the Google products Family

In truth, it’s hard to tell exactly what technical improvements/enhancements may have prompted the decision to lift the products out of beta. Google said, removal of the beta status means that those products have all reached unspecified internal metrics in terms of reliability and usability.

GMail was in beta for 5 years. And paying enterprise customers will still be provided with a 99.9 percent service-level agreement now that the products are out of beta. Now we could expect five nines industry standard for GMail.

The move is seen as a way to attract large businesses to Google Apps, its suite of messaging and productivity applications.

Beta is gone, New Features are In

Google says it has beefed up the Google Apps suite by adding offline access to e-mail and calendars and streamlining access to Google Apps for Mobile users. Also, Web-based messaging platform is now more compatible with Microsoft Outlook and it has improved contact management for Google Apps.

“We’ve come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn’t fit for large enterprises that aren’t keen to run their business on software that sounds like it’s still in the trial phase,” wrote Rajen Sheth, senior product manager, Google Apps, in a blog post.

Google: The Beta Guy

“No business is going to rely on a ‘beta’ service for something as important as e-mail,” says Matt Cain, lead e-mail analyst with market research firm Gartner. But, he adds, just by lifting the beta label does not guarantee Google success.

Google may be a giant in the search engine space, but the company is only a bit player when it comes to providing e-mail to businesses. Microsoft owns about 70 percent of the e-mail market, followed by IBM with 17 percent, according to Gartner. Cain says Microsoft and IBM don’t have any serious competition yet, but can expect nipping at their heels from Web-based services such as Google and a new offering from Cisco expected as a result of the company’s purchase of PostPath. These services are cloud based, meaning companies don’t have to host servers on site and any heavy infrastructural lifting is done by the provider offsite. Google’s pitch for its communications suite also includes a claim that Google Apps can save companies 50 to 70 percent compared to “other e-mail solutions.”

In recent months, Google has stepped up its battle against Microsoft to win over the enterprise business market. Last month Google released a new plug-in that allows businesses to switch to Google Apps. The utility can migrate a company’s e-mail, calendar, and contacts to Google’s cloud while retaining the interface of Outlook.

“Google has listened to what enterprises want, and it has delivered much of that,” Cain says. Google says it manage 15 million business inboxes and “tens of millions” more consumer Gmail inboxes.

Cain doesn’t anticipate cloud-based e-mail management to pose a threat to offerings provided by Microsoft and IBM for another two to four years.

Beta and Innovation

Google representatives say by no means does the removal of the beta label mean Google will stop innovating and experimenting with new features offered through Google Labs for Gmail, Google Calendar, and other Google App services. It says existing Google Labs users can re-enable the beta label for Gmail from the Labs tab under Settings.

Google has introduced a new feature in Gmail labs called Inbox Preview. With the help of this new feature, you will now be able to see a static preview of your inbox with your latest ten messages displayed, while Gmail is loading.

This means that if you don’t have any new messages waiting for you, you don’t really need to wait for Gmail to load. This feature will really come in handy for people who are looking to save time on slower internet connections, where Gmail could sometimes take a while to load.

To enable this feature:

1. Login to your Gmail account
2. Go to Setting > Labs
3. Scroll down to “Inbox Preview” from the list
4. Select Enable
5. Save changes

Well, I am not sure how many of you will find this feature exciting. The usability of “Inbox Preview” is inversely proportional to your internet speed. Said that, this feature might be very useful for me while travelling when I use my data card.