You may not have heard about it before, but Google has been offering additional storage for GMail and Picasa Web users for quite some time. Today, the folks in Mountain View announced big time price breaks.

If you want a little extra elbow room for your email, attachments, and shared photos plans now start at a whopping 20 gigabytes for only $5 per year. Not enough, you say? You'll be happy to know that Google offers up to a full terabyte for $256 annually. Granted, right now you can only use this space for GMail and Picasa Web stuff.

I think I'll be passing on that 16 TB option Sebastian screencapped for now, thanks.

At any rate, Chrome OS in on the way and that likely means we'll finally get our hands on the elusive GDrive as well. Here's hoping it does, anyway.

In the event that Google does open things up, how do their plans stack up against other popular offerings? Let's look at DropBox. For 50Gb of storage, you'll spend $10 per month. With Google's new plans, $20 will get you 80Gb - for the entire year. That's not too shabby.

Sure would be nice if we could use it for all-purpose storage. You listening, Google?

Who's with me?

Minimalist Gmail is a Firefox plugin that gives you control over whether to hide or show each part of the Gmail interface. You can take out individual buttons and menus and, yes, even ads. There are Greasemonkey scripts that do similar things, but not every Firefox user has delved into userscripting, so this simple add-on makes a nice alternative.

One of the nicest things about Minimalist Gmail is the way it handles chat. You can hide the chatbox, but as long as you're signed into chat, you'll still see new messages if they come in. If you're using other Gmail skins, Minimalist Gmail might be compatible with those, too. It works with my favorite clean Gmail look, Helvetimail.

[via Lifehacker]

The number of gadgets for Windows 7, both made by Microsoft and third-party developers, has skyrocketed. Only a few months ago there was little choice and almost nothing worth calling home about -- but today, you're spoilt for choice! What you have here are a bunch of the most useful (or interesting) gadgets usable with your shiny-new OS, Windows 7.

Note: If you're going to be installing third-party gadgets, you'll be faced with a confirmation dialogue before they can install:
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Gmail Labs keeps getting better at integrating other Google products into Gmail The latest addition to Labs is Google Docs Previews, which recognizes Google Docs links in your email, and lets you view Docs inline, right from Gmail. To turn it on, go to Settings in Gmail, and then hit the Labs tab. Enable "Google Docs previews in mail."

If you're a hardcore Google Docs user, being able to preview documents from Gmail is a fantastic boon to your workflow. You can keep responding to mail without having to click through to Docs or open another tab. The only thing that would make it better would be a Quick Edit option, in case you need to make a couple of changes on the fly. Google Docs Preview is the latest in a line of other "preview" Labs for Gmail, including YouTube, Flickr, Yelp, and Picasa.

Gmail's auto-complete address feature is kind of awesome. I can't remember the last time I actually looked up a contact's email address before sending a message in Gmail. Instead I just start typing their name and Gmail usually locates the address within a few characters.

But there's a downside. Sometimes you'll have more than one contact with the same first name. If you've ever sent a message to the wrong Dave, Jen, or Bob, there's a new Gmail labs feature that can help... sometimes.

The feature is called "Got the wrong Bob?" and it works much like the "Don't forget Bob" feature that was already available in Gmail labs. When the Don't forget feature is enabled, Gmail will pay attention as you start to type a list of email addresses. If that list looks similar to lists of recipients for previous email addresses, it will automatically suggest additional people you may want to include.

Instead of suggesting recipients, Got the wrong Bob will notice if you normally send emails to Paul Simon, Neil Young, and Art Garfunkel and if you accidentally address a new message to Art Vandelay instead of Garfunkel Gmail will ask if you meant to send the message to the other Art.

Of course, there's no way for Gmail to know if you've got the wrong Bob when you're sending a message to a single recipient. But that's why you should really pay more attention to what you're doing in the first place.

Over 30,000 email addresses have been compromised, with their login info posted online, in the past few days. The BBC has apparently seen the list, and it includes Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo and Gmail users. None of those companies are to blame, though, because the owners of the email addresses got caught in a phishing scam. In case you're not already in the habit of making sure you're not giving your login info to fake websites that are made to look real ones, this is a good reminder to start.

Gmail is dealing with its share of the stolen accounts by forcing password resets, and a spokesperson at Google said there was no breach in Gmail security. This comes right on the heels of a possibly-related Hotmail-only phishing attack that hit 10,000 accounts earlier this week. To be safe, make sure you use a different password for each service you sign up for (the BBC says 40% of Internet users have the same password for everything), and if you click on a link in your email, make sure you're on a legitimate website before you sign in.

[via Mashable]

Xoopit is a service that turns Gmail into a powerful media browser, letting you quickly view your attachments. Since Yahoo! acquired it, though, it's been available to Yahoo! Mail users, and now Yahoo! is looking to make it exclusive. Xoopit will become the My Photos feature of Yahoo! Mail, and it's being pulled out of Gmail completely. Even the Firefox add-on and Facebook app for Gmail are being discontinued.

How does Yahoo! explain removing Xoopit from its biggest group of users? "We will not be able to keep investing in our Xoopit for Gmail product, and don't want you to end up with a lousy experience." That's going to leave a lot of Xoopit Gmail users disgruntled. Here's how this move affects you if you're one of them: your Xoopit data disappears on November 13th, but your attachments remain untouch (albeit unindexed) in your account. I don't know about other Xoopit users, but losing the service certainly doesn't make me want to sign up for an email address with the company that took it away. Bad form, Yahoo!

Gmail Notifier makes sense. Using webmail has its advantages, but it also means either keeping a webpage open or checking back periodically to see if you have new mail. So, it's good to have an app that's lighter than a full email client, but lets you know when you have unread messages. The problem is that Google already makes a Gmail Notifier, and it's better.

Google's version of Notifier is not only better-looking than the gmailnotifier.com version, it's also available for both Windows and Mac, and supports Google Calendar alerts. Why would you want to use the off-brand version of Notifier? The only reason I could find is that it supports multiple Gmail accounts, and lets you delete messages without going to your inbox. I'll still take Google's version, thank you very much.

Todoist has been around for a while. In fact, Download Squad first wrote about this web-based to-do app back in 2007. It's come a long way since then, though, and the latest feature addition, Todoist Anywhere, lets you turn webpages and Gmail messages into to-do items. With one click, you can view your Todoist tasks and take advantage of Gmail integration.

Access Todoist at any time using a convenient bookmarklet - you can even sign up for a new account from there - and then you're good to go. Todoist anywhere supports multiple lists and recurring dates, and there's even a convenient mini-calendar included. In terms of Gmail-specific features, Todoist lets you click on a message in your inbox and add it as a task that links back to the original email.

[via Lifehacker]

The upcoming version of Mozilla's desktop email client, Thunderbird 3, just entered its 4th beta. This new beta adds significant features, including better Gmail integration, smart folders, and better search filters. If you've been looking for an excuse to stop using webmail - especially if you're a Gmail user - it looks like Thunderbird now has most of the features you would have missed.

Gmail integration now includes syncing for your sent mail and trash folders, and uses All Mail as the archive folder. Smart Folders allow you to combine special folders (like your inboxes, and the aforementioned sent and trash folders) from multiple accounts. Advanced Filtering lets you search by a specific category, including by sender, tags, and attachments. Sure, there might still be something you can do in Gmail on the web that you can't do in Thunderbird, but that list seems to be shrinking with every new beta.

[via Lifehacker]

Earlier in the year, Google rolled out Google Sync: push calendar and contact services for mobile users, based on Microsoft's Active Sync protocol. Since then, plenty of users (myself included) have yearned for Google to roll out push email for Google accounts - and today, Google has announced that Gmail is now push enabled for iPhone, iPod touch and Windows Mobile devices.

Unfortunately the system is Microsoft Exchange-based, and iPhone OS devices can only support on Exchange configuration, so if you're already hooked up to an Exchange server at work you won't be able to use Google Sync's push services for a personal Google account.

Google has also reminded folks that these Push services are more resource-intensive and that your battery life may decrease as you use Push services - but if you need to know about emails from a Google account as they come in, you'll want to enable this on your device. Google Apps customers are also able to take advantage of Push email, and simply need to set up syncing via their Google Apps control panel to get started.

Whilst Google-holics everywhere will no-doubt be rejoicing with this addition, it's going to be interesting to see how Apple reacts to this move: until now, the paid-for MobileMe service has been the only few consumer Push-enabled mail-service on the iPhone OS alongside Yahoo Mail which launched Push for iPhone in 2007.

Updated at 3pm EST to reflect the Yahoo Mail push service.

Postbox - the e-mail application for Windows and Mac OS that we first mentioned back in February has exited it's long Beta period and reached a 1.0 release.

Postbox pitches itself as being 'smarter than your average e-mail client'. Built on a Mozilla core, the application works behind the scenes to catalog everything in your mail. Text, contacts, addresses, links, pictures, attachments - all of them are indexed, providing a very powerful search experience and a useful e-mail view that abstracts potentially interesting content from the body of the e-mail itself.

If, like me, you use GMail, you will have become accustomed to the conversation based message view and this is a perspective that Postbox retains, making migration from the web interface to the Postbox application a painless process. Postbox is compatible with a wide range of e-mail services (Gmail via IMAP and POP3, MobileMe, AOL Mail, Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail Plus as well as any generic IMAP or POP3 account) and includes excellent integration with the most popular services. One such example is the integration between Postbox's powerful 'To Do' flagging function and GMail's own 'Star' system.

The feature list is really too extensive to list here, but includes RSS support, Newsgroups support, Facebook / Friendfeed / Twitter integration, emoticons, draft auto-saving, password protection, spam filtering, return receipts, add-ons and much more.

Postbox retails for $39.95 with discounts available for 'Family Pack' purchases. A 'Lifetime Upgrade' option is also available.

By far the best way to experience Postbox's powerful search facility and unique content abstraction is by trying it - and thankfully a free trial is available from the Postbox site.

The only question is... is there still a place for desktop e-mail clients in today's online e-mail environment?

If you're a hardcore Gmail user, I don't need to tell you that Gmail was down yesterday. The Gmail Blog has an explanation of the outage, which officially lasted for 100 minutes. So, here's the reason you couldn't get to your Gmail yesterday, straight from the horse's mouth: apparently Google took down some servers for routine maintenance. This would have been fine, but because of some recent improvements to the way Gmail handles requests, the request routers became overloaded. This caused them to shunt the workload over to other request routers, which quickly became overloaded, too. Oops.

Fortunately, Google has tons of extra capacity just waiting to be switched on in this kind of emergency, so things were back up and running relatively quickly. Google has quite rightly determined that their request routers need some failure isolation improvements to prevent a similar chain reaction in the future, and they promise they're working on it. Maybe this will quiet down all of the "#gfail" naysayers who freaked out via Twitter the minute the service went down yesterday.