If your Gmail account doesn’t seem to be working properly today, you’re not alone.
The official status dashboard for Google Workspace suggests that the issues began at around 5am Pacific on Saturday morning, with users experiencing both “misclassification of emails in their inbox and additional spam warnings.”
For me, that meant my Primary inbox was filled with messages that would normally appear in the Promotions, Social, or Updates inboxes, and that spam warnings were appearing in emails from known senders.
“We are actively working to resolve the issue,” Google said. “As always, we encourage users to follow standard best practices when engaging with messages from unknown senders.”
TechCrunch has reached out to Google for additional comment.
Adverts will soon appear at the top of the AI tool ChatGPT for some users, the company OpenAI has announced. The trial will initially take place in the US, and will affect some ChatGPT users on the free service and a new subscription tier, called ChatGPT Go. This cheaper option will be available for all users worldwide, and will cost $8 a month, or the equivalent pricing in other currencies. OpenAI says during the trial, relevant ads will appear after a prompt – for example, asking ChatGPT for places to visit in Mexico could result in holiday ads appearing. BBC
Doctors and medical experts have warned of the growing evidence of “health harms” from tech and devices on children and young people in the UK. The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AoMRC) said frontline clinicians have given personal testimony about “horrific cases they have treated in primary, secondary and community settings throughout the NHS and across most medical specialities”. The body, which represents 23 medical royal colleges and faculties, plans to gather evidence to establish the issues healthcare professionals and specialists are seeing repeatedly that may be attributed to tech and devices. Sky News
“What are you even doing in 2025?” says a handsome kid in a denim jacket, somewhere just shy of 18. “Out there it looks like everyone is glued to their phones, chasing nothing.” The AI-generated teenager features in an Instagram video that has more than 600,000 likes from an account dubbed Maximal Nostalgia. The video is one of dozens singing the praises of the 1970s and 1980s. Created with AI, the videos urge viewers to relive their halcyon days. The clips have gone viral across Instagram and Facebook, part of a new type of AI content that has been dubbed “boomerslop”. Telegraph
More than 60 Labour MPs have written to Keir Starmer urging him to back a social media ban for under-16s, with peers due to vote on the issue this week. The MPs, who include select committee chairs, former frontbenchers, and MPs from the right and left of the party, are seeking to put pressure on the Prime Minister as calls mount for the UK to follow Australia’s precedent. Starmer has said he is open to a ban but members of the House of Lords are looking to force the issue when they vote this week on an amendment to the children, wellbeing and schools bill. Guardian
Huawei has released a new update for the Watch Ultimate 2 smartwatch, installing new health features, including a heart failure risk assessment. The update comes with HarmonyOS firmware version 6.0.0.209 and is spreading in batches. The new additions include a coronary heart disease risk assessment. Users can join a coronary heart disease research project via the Huawei Research app on their smartphone. HuaweiCentral
Google has just changed Gmail after twenty years. In among countless AI upgrades — including “personalized AI” that gives Gemini access to all your data in Gmail, Photos and more, comes a surprising decision. You can now change your primary Gmail address for the first time ever. You shouldn’t hesitate to do so. This new option is good — but it’s not perfect. And per 9to5Google, “Google also notes this can only be done once every 12 months, up to 3 times, so make this one count.” Forbes
Google on Thursday unveiled new artificial intelligence features in Gmail, an effort by the technology giant to refresh its 22-year-old messaging app amid growing use of AI.
The advancements include helping users write messages, finding information buried in email inboxes and delivering daily to-do lists. Gmail’s new AI features initially will only be available in English within the U.S. Some features will be accessible to all users free of charge, while others require G1 Ultra and Pro subscriptions.
Alphabet-owned Google is rolling out the new email tools as the company weaves functionality from its latest large language model, Gemini 3, into its online search and other applications. Yet the push comes amid mounting privacy concerns around the use of generative AI, including its potential access to personal information.
Personalized writing aid
With the new features, all Gmail users will have access to what Google calls a ‘Help Me Write’ tool, which assists users with their grammar and phrasing. The tech analyzes users’ previous emails to better understand their writing style so it can personalize emails and make real-time suggestions on how to respond to a message.
Gmail will also offer an AI Overview feature, which summarizes email exchanges and highlights key takeaways from longer threads.
Both features will be available on the Web and mobile versions of Gmail.
“This is us delivering on Gmail proactively having your back,” said Blake Barnes, a Google vice president of product.
Google is offering paid Pro and Ultra subscribers access to technology that lets users ask natural-language questions directly in the Gmail search bar. Subscribers will also have access to a dedicated chatbot for follow-up questions.
For example, instead of manually searching for last month’s electric bill, a user could ask, “How much was my electric bill last month?” Gemini would scan the user’s email history, highlight the information and provide direct access to any relevant messages.
Another feature, “AI Inbox,” is also being rolled out to a handful of customers for testing. When it’s turned on, the function will sift through inboxes and suggest to-do lists and topics that users might want to explore.
Meanwhile, the so-called “Catch me up” tool will provide users with reminders of their upcoming events and appointments. This includes but is not limited to upcoming reservations, purchases and deliveries, and cancelled or rescheduled appointments.
How to opt out
Incorporating AI directly into Gmail could pose risks for Google, given that large language models can sometimes present erroneous or misleading information. And although users can proofread AI-aided messages before they’re sent, the tech could potentially make mistakes.
Still, Gmail users can turn off the AI features. To do so, users should open their Gmail account settings and, under the “General” tab, scroll to the “Smart” features and personalization section. Users should then uncheck “Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet,” and then save their changes.
Here’s some light — and revolting! — reading while we wait for the Epstein Files to be released (or stonewalled). You can now peruse the Jeffrey Epstein emails, recently released by Congress, in a simulated Gmail account.
Jmail is about as faithful a recreation of Gmail as you could imagine. Just like a real inbox, the messages are sorted from the most recent, up to the eve of Epstein’s 2019 arrest for the sex trafficking of minors. It includes a working search feature.
Screenshot of the Jmail project. A simulated Gmail inbox of Jeffrey Epstein, using real emails released by Congress. (Luke Igel / Riley Walz)
The US House Oversight Committee released the emails on November 12. Their revelations put Donald Trump’s relationship with the sex trafficker back in the spotlight. The president’s name appears many times in the more than 20,000 documents. In one, the late sex offender claimed Trump “knew about the girls.”
In a 2011 email to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein said Trump “spent hours at my house” with someone whose name was redacted. (The committee said it was a victim.) In a 2017 thread, Epstein described the current president as “worse in real life and upclose.” In 2018, the disgraced financier boasted he was “the one able to take [Trump] down.”
Another public figure who came out looking even worse than before was the Andrew formerly known as “Prince” (Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor). He told Epstein in 2011, “We’re in this together.” Then there’s former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. He stayed in touch with Epstein as recently as 2019, long after the latter’s 2008 arrest for soliciting underage sex. In the wake of the email dump, Summers was put on leave from Harvard and resigned from OpenAI’s board.
You can check out Jmail at the project’s website. Nobody will fault you if you need to shower afterward (and perhaps douse yourself in bleach).
Last week, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released 20,000 documents from the estate of registered sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. They included thousands of emails sent between Epstein and high-profile people like Epstein confidant Ghislaine Maxwell, political strategist Steve Bannon, journalist Michael Wolff, and former US treasury secretary Larry Summers, as well as revealing text messages. Many of them allude or directly refer to president Donald Trump.
Now, you can browse all those emails just like you would on your own Gmail account.
Jmail is a website that looks very much like Gmail, except that there is a little hat hanging on the logo and that the profile picture in the top right corner is a grinning Epstein. (Click on it and it says “Hi Jeffrey!”) The inbox lets you click through thousands of emails, formatted to look exactly like a regular message would in your inbox. In the sidebar, you can sort by Inbox, Starred, and Sent. In Gmail, a lower sidebar section reads Labels and separates emails by category. In Jmail, it is a list of people who corresponded with Epstein.
The site was created by serial pranksterRiley Walz and Luke Igel, cofounder of an AI video editing tool called Kino AI. Igel tells WIRED that he brought the idea to Walz—something Walz confirms—and then the two of them put the website together with Cursor in a single night. Walz revealed Jmail in an X post, writing, “We cloned Gmail, except you’re logged in as Epstein and can see his emails.”
Jmail is a much more readable way to peruse the huge cache of emails released from the Epstein estate than parsing through tens of thousands of PDFs on a Google Drive. Among its useful features is that it rejiggers Gmail’s starring feature, letting users flag emails they view as important and then ranking them based on how many people do so. By default, the inbox lists the emails in the order of recency; the community starring feature is a way to surface what people see as more important emails.
“The emails were just so hard to read,” Igel says. “It felt like so much of the shock would’ve come if you saw actual screenshots of the actual inbox, but what you were seeing was these really low quality, poorly scanned PDFs. You have to do a few steps of imagination to remind yourself that this is indeed a real email.”
Being able to see these emails in a more familiar, readable format makes it much easier to follow threads and back-and-forths, but also reveals weird things about Epstein’s communications. Igel says there’s a noticeable increase in typos and sporadic formatting when Epstein switches from a desktop keyboard to a touchscreen device in the early 2010s.
Google is rolling out an update for Gmail on mobile and the web that will make it easier to track emails for your deliveries. The most prominent change you’ll see is a new Purchases tab, where Gmail will put all your delivery emails so you can view them in one place. In the app, you’ll be able to access the new view via the side menu. Just click the hamburger icon in the text box at the top of the interface.
Even though deliveries now have their own tab, Gmail will still show packages that are set to arrive within the day as cards at the top of your primary inbox, as you can see in the image above. Each card comes with a “See item” or a “Track Package” button that you can click or tap without having to search for the original delivery email. The new delivery tab will start showing up in your personal Gmail accounts starting today.
In addition, Google is updating Gmail’s Promotions tab, allowing you to sort the emails in it by “most relevant.” Gmail will decide which brands and emails are most relevant for you based on what you’ve interacted with the most in the past. It will also send you “nudges” on upcoming deals and offers that are set to expire soon. You’ll see the changes to the Promotions tab in the coming weeks.
Google is officially debunking a series of reports that claimed Gmail has been hit with a “major” security issue in recent days. “We want to reassure our users that Gmail’s protections are strong and effective,” the company said in a somewhat unusual statement. “Several inaccurate claims surfaced recently that incorrectly stated that we issued a broad warning to all Gmail users about a major Gmail security issue. This is entirely false.”
Google doesn’t detail the erroneous claims in its post. But, as Forbes, it seems to be referring to several recent reports that stated the company issued an “emergency warning” to all of its 2.5 billion users in response to a phishing attack that targeted a Salesforce instance used by the company. That incident, however, was first reported by Google in and the company said in an August 8 update that it had finished notifying everyone affected.
It’s not clear why that report resurfaced now or how it was misconstrued into a supposed warning impacting all Gmail users, but Google is now trying to set the record straight. “While it’s always the case that phishers are looking for ways to infiltrate inboxes, our protections continue to block more than 99.9% of phishing and malware attempts from reaching users,” the company said. “It’s crucial that conversation in this space is accurate and factual.”
Google also notes that it encourages all users to set up “a secure password alternative,” such as for maximum protection.
Andrew Ferguson, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission, recently expressed concern that “Alphabet’s administration of Gmail is designed to have partisan effects.”
“My understanding from recent reporting is that Gmail’s spam filters routinely block messages from reaching consumers when those messages come from Republican senders but fail to block similar messages sent by Democrats,” Ferguson wrote.
He warned Alphabet that if Gmail’s filters “keep Americans from receiving speech they expect, or donating as they see fit, the filters may harm American consumers and may violate the FTC Act’s prohibition of unfair or deceptive trade practices,” adding this could lead to “an FTC investigation and potential enforcement action.”
In response, a Google spokesperson told Axios that Gmail’s spam filters “look at a variety of objective signals – like whether people mark a particular email as spam, or if a particular ad agency is sending a high volume of emails that are often marked by people as spam,” and they said the company applies this approach “equally to all senders, regardless of political ideology.”
The spokesperson also said, “We will review this letter and look forward to engaging constructively.”
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Cal. — Google has sent out an updated warning to billions of Gmail users about a massive data breach.
They say around 2.5 billion users are urged to reset their passwords immediately. And to tighten security after the contact information of small and medium sized businesses was hacked. KXL Tech Expert Brian Westbrook says Gmail users should also be on guard for phishing attacks. He recommends when users do change their passwords, they make sure it’s unique. And also to retire your old Gmail password while using 2 factor authorization moving forward.
In R. C. Sherriff’s novel The Hopkins Manuscript, readers are transported to a world 800 years after a cataclysmic event ended Western civilization. In pursuit of clues about a blank spot in their planet’s history, scientists belonging to a new world order discover diary entries in a swamp-infested wasteland formerly known as England. For the inhabitants of this new empire, it is only through this record of a retired school teacher’s humdrum rural life, his petty vanities and attempts to breed prize-winning chickens, that they begin to learn about 20th-century Britain.
If I were to teach futuristic beings about life on earth, I once believed I could produce a time capsule more profound than Sherriff’s small-minded protagonist, Edgar Hopkins. But scrolling through my decade-old Facebook posts this week, I was presented with the possibility that my legacy may be even more drab.
Earlier this month, Meta announced that my teenage status updates were exactly the kind of content it wants to pass on to future generations of artificial intelligence. From June 26, old public posts, holiday photos, and even the names of millions of Facebook and Instagram users around the world would effectively be treated as a time capsule of humanity and transformed into training data.
That means my mundane posts about university essay deadlines (“3 energy drinks down 1,000 words to go”) as well as unremarkable holiday snaps (one captures me slumped over my phone on a stationary ferry) are about to become part of that corpus. The fact that these memories are so dull, and also very personal, makes Meta’s interest more unsettling.
The company says it is only interested in content that is already public: private messages, posts shared exclusively with friends, and Instagram Stories are out of bounds. Despite that, AI is suddenly feasting on personal artifacts that have, for years, been gathering dust in unvisited corners of the internet. For those reading from outside Europe, the deed is already done. The deadline announced by Meta applied only to Europeans. The posts of American Facebook and Instagram users have been training Meta AI models since 2023, according to company spokesperson Matthew Pollard.
Meta is not the only company turning my online history into AI fodder. WIRED’s Reece Rogers recently discovered that Google’s AI search feature was copying his journalism. But finding out which personal remnants exactly are feeding future chatbots was not easy. Some sites I’ve contributed to over the years are hard to trace. Early social network Myspace was acquired by Time Inc. in 2016, which in turn was acquired by a company called Meredith Corporation two years later. When I asked Meredith about my old account, they replied that Myspace had since been spun off to an advertising firm, Viant Technology. An email to a company contact listed on its website was returned with a message that the address “couldn’t be found.”
Asking companies still in business about my old accounts was more straightforward. Blogging platform Tumblr, owned by WordPress owner Automattic, said unless I’d opted out, the public posts I made as a teenager will be shared with “a small network of content and research partners, including those that train AI models” per a February announcement. YahooMail, which I used for years, told me that a sample of old emails—which have apparently been “anonymized” and “aggregated”—are being “utilized” by an AI model internally to do things like summarize messages. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn also said my public posts were being used to train AI although some “personal” details included in those posts were excluded, according to a company spokesperson, who did not specify what those personal details were.
Sadly, people aren’t always as nice as they could be, and that’s where you need to turn to the various blocking and reporting features on the digital platforms you frequent. Overall, these features work well and effectively put up barriers between you and those you don’t want to hear from.
Video Chat – From Sci-Fi to Sci-Fact
But what happens when you want to unblock someone? Maybe you’ve had a change of heart—perhaps enough water has gone under enough bridges to make you ready to think again. Or maybe you think you might have accidentally blocked someone you didn’t mean to. Whatever the reason, it’s worth reviewing your block lists once in a while.
This is quite a significant undertaking, considering all the different accounts you’re probably signed up to, but it only takes a few minutes each time—and you don’t need to do it all that frequently.
Social apps
Blocked contacts on Instagram.Screenshot: Instagram
On the Facebook website and inside the Facebook mobile app, you can click your profile picture (top right), then Settings & privacy, Settings, and Blocking. You can view and edit lists of people you’ve blocked outright or just asked to see less of in the news feed.
Instagram
When it comes to Instagram, in the app, tap your profile picture (bottom right), then the three horizontal lines (top right), then Blocked. If you’re using Instagram on the web, click More (bottom left), then Settings and Blocked.
Twitter/X
On the social network formerly known as Twitter (now called X), if you load up the website, you can click the three dots on the left, then Settings and Privacy, Privacy and Safety, Mute and Block, and Blocked Accounts. In the mobile app, tap your profile picture (top left), then Settings & Support to get to Settings and Privacy.
Snapchat
Head into the mobile app, and tap your profile picture (top left): Then it’s the gear icon (top right), then Blocked users. While there is an official Snapchat interface on the web you can access with your account, it does have its limitations—and you can’t access your blocked Snapchat contacts from a web browser.
Tiktok
In the mobile app, tap Profile, then the three horizontal lines (top right), then Settings and Privacy, Privacy, and Blocked accounts. As with Snapchat, while you can get at your TikTok account on the web and access a limited number of settings, you can’t see a list of people you’ve blocked in a browser.
Messaging apps
Finding blocked contacts on WhatsApp.Screenshot: WhatsApp
iPhone and iPad
If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, it’s the same block list for the Phone app, Messages, and FaceTime. Open up Settings in iOS, then choose Phone and Blocked Contacts, Messages and Blocked Contacts, or FaceTime and Blocked Contacts. It’s the same list in each case, and you can add new people to it as well as take people off it.
On Android, the situation varies slightly depending on your phone, but on Pixel devices, the blocked list is synced between the Phone and Messages apps. You can tap the three dots (top right) from the Phone app, then Settings and Blocked numbers. From Messages, you can tap your profile picture (top right), then Spam and Blocked to see messages you’ve blocked; tap the three dots (top right) and Blocked numbers to view those as well.
WhatsApp
When it comes to WhatsApp, even after all these years, the mobile app interface is still different depending on which type of phone you have: If you’re on Android, tap the three dots (top right of the Chats tab), then choose Settings, Privacy, and Blocked contacts. On iOS, it’s Settings, then Privacy, and Blocked.
Signal
As for Signal, you can get to your list of blocked contacts by tapping on the three dots in the top right corner of the Chats tab, then picking Settings, Privacy, and Blocked. The next screen lets you add another contact to your blocked list, or unblock a contact that you’ve previously put there.
Telegram
The last messaging app we’ll cover is Telegram, which, like WhatsApp, has a different interface on different platforms. On Android, tap the three horizontal lines (top left), then Settings, Privacy and Security, and Blocked Users. On iOS, you switch to the Settings tab, then pick Privacy and Security and Blocked Users.
Email apps
You may have blocked contacts in your email app, too.Screenshot: Apple Mail
Your email clients are the final group of apps you want to check for blocked contacts. In Gmail on the web, click the gear icon (top right), then See all settings and Filters and blocked addresses. Scroll down to see email addresses that have been blocked and unblock them if needed.
Gmail
Strangely enough, you can’t get to these email addresses through the Gmail app on mobile—you can only get to the contacts blocked through your Google account, which covers services such as Google Chat, Google Photos, and Google Maps. These blocked users are separate from Gmail, and you can also find a list in your Google account on the web.
Apple Mail
If Apple Mail is your email service of choice, in the macOS client you can open the Mail menu and choose Settings, then switch to the Junk Mail tab and click Blocked to see email addresses you aren’t receiving messages from. On iOS, this list is actually shared with the Phone, Messages, and FaceTime apps—you can see it if you tap Mail and then Blocked from iOS Settings. The list isn’t available via iCloud on the web.
Outlook
In the default Outlook app for Windows, you need to click on the gear icon (top right), then choose Email and Junk email to find your blocked senders and domains. The layout is exactly the same if you open Outlook on the web to get to the same feature, but the list of blocked email addresses isn’t available through the Outlook mobile app.
Suppose you’re using a different email application. In that case, whether through a desktop client or a web interface, it shouldn’t be too difficult to find the options for blocked senders or junk emails—if there’s a regular correspondent who you haven’t heard from for quite some time, this might be why.
Deleting digital accounts that you rarely or never use not only reduces the amount of clutter in your online life—it keeps you safer too. Every extra account you’ve got is an extra target for a hacker, an extra database that might leak, and an extra way that someone might get access to some of your bigger, more important accounts. If you want to minimize your exposure, keep open only the accounts you need.
When it comes to deleting a Google account, the process isn’t difficult or long-winded, and Google will even let you download your data first. Bear in mind that deleting a Google account wipes out everything associated with your Google username, from the emails in Gmail, to the places you’ve saved in Google Maps, to the files you’ve saved to Google Drive.
It’s also worth noting that Google shuts down accounts automatically if they haven’t been used for two years, primarily for the security reasons that we’ve already mentioned. If you go to delete a Google account and find that it’s already gone, this might be why—though Google does send plenty of warnings in advance. You can read more about Google’s inactive account deletion policy if you think this has happened to your account.
Downloading Your Data
Select the types of data you want to export from your account.
Google via David Nield
Head to your Google account page on the web, and you’ll see a Data and privacy link on the left: Click on this to get an overview of all the data Google has on you (which might be more than you realized). To get your data off Google’s servers and on to your local computer, follow the Download your data link toward the bottom of the page.
The next screen lets you select the types of data you want to export. It includes data from across all of Google’s apps and services, including browsing history saved in Chrome, your Google Calendar appointments, photos and videos in Google Photos, videos you’ve uploaded to YouTube, and your Google Chat logs. It shows you the full scope of all the data that’ll be wiped when you delete your Google account.
For busier Google accounts, there can be a daunting amount of material here. Use the checkboxes to select the categories of data you’d like to download: The Select all and Deselect all options at the top might help. Some entries in the list have options beneath them to let you pick between different export formats, and to select particular subsections of data (such as activity categories in Google Fit) to download.
When you’re happy with your selection, click the Next step button. You then have to choose how you want to get your download. You can get a download link over email, or have the archive sent straight to a cloud storage account. You’re also able to set up recurring downloads of the selected data, which you’re not going to want to do if you’re deleting your Google account.
Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin loved pulling pranks, so much so they began rolling outlandish ideas every April Fool’s Day not long after starting their company more than a quarter century ago. One year, Google posted a job opening for a Copernicus research center on the moon. Another year, the company said it planned to roll out a “scratch and sniff” feature on its search engine.Related video above: Elon Musk says he’s creating Gmail rival XMailThe jokes were so consistently over-the-top that people learned to laugh them off as another example of Google mischief. And that’s why Page and Brin decided to unveil something no one would believe was possible 20 years ago on April Fool’s Day.It was Gmail, a free service boasting 1 gigabyte of storage per account, an amount that sounds almost pedestrian in an age of one-terabyte iPhones. But it sounded like a preposterous amount of email capacity back then, enough to store about 13,500 emails before running out of space compared to just 30 to 60 emails in the then-leading webmail services run by Yahoo and Microsoft. That translated into 250 to 500 times more email storage space. Besides the quantum leap in storage, Gmail also came equipped with Google’s search technology so users could quickly retrieve a tidbit from an old email, photo or other personal information stored on the service. It also automatically threaded together a string of communications about the same topic so everything flowed together as if it was a single conversation.”The original pitch we put together was all about the three ‘S’s” — storage, search and speed,” said former Google executive Marissa Mayer, who helped design Gmail and other company products before later becoming Yahoo’s CEO.It was such a mind-bending concept that shortly after The Associated Press published a story about Gmail late on the afternoon of April Fool’s 2004, readers began calling and emailing to inform the news agency Google’s pranksters had duped it.”That was part of the charm, making a product that people won’t believe is real. It kind of changed people’s perceptions about the kinds of applications that were possible within a web browser,” former Google engineer Paul Buchheit recalled during a recent AP interview about his efforts to build Gmail. It took three years to do as part of a project called “Caribou” — a reference to a running gag in the Dilbert comic strip. “There was something sort of absurd about the name Caribou, it just made me laugh,” said Buchheit, the 23rd employee hired at a company that now employs more than 180,000 people.The AP knew Google wasn’t joking about Gmail because an AP reporter had been abruptly asked to come down from San Francisco to the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters to see something that would make the trip worthwhile.After arriving at a still-developing corporate campus that would soon blossom into what became known as the “Googleplex,” the AP reporter was ushered into a small office where Page was wearing a mischievous grin while sitting in front of his laptop computer.Page, then just 31 years old, showed off Gmail’s sleekly designed inbox and demonstrated how quickly it operated within Microsoft’s now-retired Explorer web browser. And he pointed out there was no delete button featured in the main control window because it wouldn’t be necessary, given Gmail had so much storage and could be so easily searched. “I think people are really going to like this,” Page predicted.As with so many other things, Page was right. Gmail now has an estimated 1.8 billion active accounts — each one now offering 15 gigabytes of free storage bundled with Google Photos and Google Drive. Even though that’s 15 times more storage than Gmail initially offered, it’s still not enough for many users who rarely see the need to purge their accounts, just as Google hoped. The digital hoarding of email, photos and other content is why Google, Apple and other companies now make money from selling additional storage capacity in their data centers. (In Google’s case, it charges anywhere from $30 annually for 200 gigabytes of storage to $250 annually for 5 terabytes of storage). Gmail’s existence is also why other free email services and the internal email accounts that employees use on their jobs offer far more storage than was fathomed 20 years ago.”We were trying to shift the way people had been thinking because people were working in this model of storage scarcity for so long that deleting became a default action,” Buchheit said.Gmail was a game changer in several other ways while becoming the first building block in the expansion of Google’s internet empire beyond its still-dominant search engine. After Gmail came Google Maps and Google Docs with word processing and spreadsheet applications. Then came the acquisition of the video site YouTube, followed by the introduction of the Chrome browser and the Android operating system that powers most of the world’s smartphones. With Gmail’s explicitly stated intention to scan the content of emails to get a better understanding of users’ interests, Google also left little doubt that digital surveillance in pursuit of selling more ads would be part of its expanding ambitions.Although it immediately generated a buzz, Gmail started with a limited scope because Google initially only had enough computing capacity to support a small audience of users. “When we launched, we only had 300 machines and they were really old machines that no one else wanted,” Buchheit said, with a chuckle. “We only had enough capacity for 10,000 users, which is a little absurd.”But that scarcity created an air of exclusivity around Gmail that drove feverish demand for elusive invitations to sign up. At one point, invitations to open a Gmail account were selling for $250 apiece on eBay. “It became a bit like a social currency, where people would go, ‘Hey, I got a Gmail invite, you want one?’” Buchheit said.Although signing up for Gmail became increasingly easier as more of Google’s network of massive data centers came online, the company didn’t begin accepting all comers to the email service until it opened the floodgates as a Valentine’s Day present to the world in 2007.A few weeks later on April Fool’s Day in 2007, Google announced a new feature called “Gmail Paper” offering users the chance to have Google print out their email archive on “94% post-consumer organic soybean sputum ” and then have it sent to them through the Postal Service. Google really was joking around that time.
SAN FRANCISCO —
Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin loved pulling pranks, so much so they began rolling outlandish ideas every April Fool’s Day not long after starting their company more than a quarter century ago. One year, Google posted a job opening for a Copernicus research center on the moon. Another year, the company said it planned to roll out a “scratch and sniff” feature on its search engine.
Related video above: Elon Musk says he’s creating Gmail rival XMail
The jokes were so consistently over-the-top that people learned to laugh them off as another example of Google mischief. And that’s why Page and Brin decided to unveil something no one would believe was possible 20 years ago on April Fool’s Day.
It was Gmail, a free service boasting 1 gigabyte of storage per account, an amount that sounds almost pedestrian in an age of one-terabyte iPhones. But it sounded like a preposterous amount of email capacity back then, enough to store about 13,500 emails before running out of space compared to just 30 to 60 emails in the then-leading webmail services run by Yahoo and Microsoft. That translated into 250 to 500 times more email storage space.
Besides the quantum leap in storage, Gmail also came equipped with Google’s search technology so users could quickly retrieve a tidbit from an old email, photo or other personal information stored on the service. It also automatically threaded together a string of communications about the same topic so everything flowed together as if it was a single conversation.
“The original pitch we put together was all about the three ‘S’s” — storage, search and speed,” said former Google executive Marissa Mayer, who helped design Gmail and other company products before later becoming Yahoo’s CEO.
It was such a mind-bending concept that shortly after The Associated Press published a story about Gmail late on the afternoon of April Fool’s 2004, readers began calling and emailing to inform the news agency Google’s pranksters had duped it.
“That was part of the charm, making a product that people won’t believe is real. It kind of changed people’s perceptions about the kinds of applications that were possible within a web browser,” former Google engineer Paul Buchheit recalled during a recent AP interview about his efforts to build Gmail.
It took three years to do as part of a project called “Caribou” — a reference to a running gag in the Dilbert comic strip. “There was something sort of absurd about the name Caribou, it just made me laugh,” said Buchheit, the 23rd employee hired at a company that now employs more than 180,000 people.
The AP knew Google wasn’t joking about Gmail because an AP reporter had been abruptly asked to come down from San Francisco to the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters to see something that would make the trip worthwhile.
After arriving at a still-developing corporate campus that would soon blossom into what became known as the “Googleplex,” the AP reporter was ushered into a small office where Page was wearing a mischievous grin while sitting in front of his laptop computer.
Page, then just 31 years old, showed off Gmail’s sleekly designed inbox and demonstrated how quickly it operated within Microsoft’s now-retired Explorer web browser. And he pointed out there was no delete button featured in the main control window because it wouldn’t be necessary, given Gmail had so much storage and could be so easily searched. “I think people are really going to like this,” Page predicted.
As with so many other things, Page was right. Gmail now has an estimated 1.8 billion active accounts — each one now offering 15 gigabytes of free storage bundled with Google Photos and Google Drive. Even though that’s 15 times more storage than Gmail initially offered, it’s still not enough for many users who rarely see the need to purge their accounts, just as Google hoped.
The digital hoarding of email, photos and other content is why Google, Apple and other companies now make money from selling additional storage capacity in their data centers. (In Google’s case, it charges anywhere from $30 annually for 200 gigabytes of storage to $250 annually for 5 terabytes of storage). Gmail’s existence is also why other free email services and the internal email accounts that employees use on their jobs offer far more storage than was fathomed 20 years ago.
“We were trying to shift the way people had been thinking because people were working in this model of storage scarcity for so long that deleting became a default action,” Buchheit said.
Gmail was a game changer in several other ways while becoming the first building block in the expansion of Google’s internet empire beyond its still-dominant search engine.
After Gmail came Google Maps and Google Docs with word processing and spreadsheet applications. Then came the acquisition of the video site YouTube, followed by the introduction of the Chrome browser and the Android operating system that powers most of the world’s smartphones. With Gmail’s explicitly stated intention to scan the content of emails to get a better understanding of users’ interests, Google also left little doubt that digital surveillance in pursuit of selling more ads would be part of its expanding ambitions.
Although it immediately generated a buzz, Gmail started with a limited scope because Google initially only had enough computing capacity to support a small audience of users.
“When we launched, we only had 300 machines and they were really old machines that no one else wanted,” Buchheit said, with a chuckle. “We only had enough capacity for 10,000 users, which is a little absurd.”
But that scarcity created an air of exclusivity around Gmail that drove feverish demand for elusive invitations to sign up. At one point, invitations to open a Gmail account were selling for $250 apiece on eBay. “It became a bit like a social currency, where people would go, ‘Hey, I got a Gmail invite, you want one?’” Buchheit said.
Although signing up for Gmail became increasingly easier as more of Google’s network of massive data centers came online, the company didn’t begin accepting all comers to the email service until it opened the floodgates as a Valentine’s Day present to the world in 2007.
A few weeks later on April Fool’s Day in 2007, Google announced a new feature called “Gmail Paper” offering users the chance to have Google print out their email archive on “94% post-consumer organic soybean sputum ” and then have it sent to them through the Postal Service. Google really was joking around that time.
How many unread emails do you have right now? Sixty? Six thousand? Well, all of those messages and attachments take up space, whether they’re unread, old, or archived. And if you’re on Gmail and aren’t one of those weird inbox zero people who stays on top of things, you might be running out of space.
If Google’s got its Gmail hooks into you, there’s a good chance you’re also invested in the other parts of Google’s Cloud ecosystem—Drive and Photos. Google used to be a bastion of infinite storage space—once offering unlimited room for photos and emails. But now the company has been a lot more strict about counting the megabytes you use across its services. Soon, even WhatsApp backups may count against your storage allotment.
Google gives users 15 GB of digital storage for free. That includes everything in Gmail, Google Drive, and any uncompressed images stored in Google Photos. It’s a lot of free space, but if you get invested in the Google ecosystem—especially if your Android phone automatically backs up your data to Google’s cloud—you might find that you fill it up quickly. Once you hit the cap, you won’t be able to add anything to Google Drive, save new photos, or even send or receive emails. Google sends warnings when you’re running low, but those are easy to miss, and they often leave users scrambling to free up some space. Here’s how to avoid finding yourself in that position.
Before you start, see where you stand: Google’s Storage page will show you how much space you’ve taken up across Drive, Gmail, and Photos.
Reply None
The simplest way to free up Gmail space is to batch delete just about every damn thing in your inbox. Go to your Promotions tab and the Social tab at the top of your inbox, check the box in the top left corner to select all messages, then click Delete. (It’s the button that looks like a trash can, of course). The only problem with this method is that there are likely messages in there you want to keep. If you do much of your shopping online, for instance, it’s good to keep all your receipts. Luckily, there are a couple easy ways to sift through the mess and keep only what you need.
One method, suggested by WIRED senior writer Lily Hay Newman, is to curate your bulk deletions by email address. Even if they come from the same company, spam messages are often sent from a different email address than the actually useful info like receipts or order information. For example, PayPal sends receipts from service@paypal.com, while its marketing blasts (“Sign up for PayPal credit NOW!”) come from paypal@mail.paypal.com. Shipping info from Amazon comes via shipment-tracking@amazon.com. Spam comes from the likes of vfe-campaign-response@amazon.com and no-reply@business.amazon.com. As soon as you figure out which email addresses can be safely disregarded, you can delete them all without purging the stuff you want to keep. Just copy and paste the offending email address into the search bar and batch delete everything that pops up.
Another method (this one comes from former WIRED one Peter Rubin) is to sort your emails by file size. In the Gmail search bar, type “size:10mb” or “larger:10mb” (or whatever size you want) to bring up emails with attachments that exceed the size you define in the search. You’ll still have to go through and select what you want to delete, but at least it brings all the big emails together in one place. Your best bet would be to start big and work your way down.
Garbage Day
After deleting the thousands of emails you’ve filtered out, you may notice that your storage hasn’t budged. Though you may have thrown everything into the trash, you still have to empty the bin itself. Unlike your garbage IRL, if you just leave them sitting there in Gmail’s trash, your trashed emails will be deleted automatically after 30 days. But if your goal is to free up space, it’s best to take care of that purge manually. (Also, you have a chance to double-check to make sure nothing important got tossed into the trash by accident.)
Look for the trash can inside the left sidebar in Gmail and click on it. (If you don’t see it, click on More to expand the menu to show the trash icon.) Once inside your trash, you can just click Empty Trash Now near the top of the screen and everything will vanish into the digital underworld. Finally, you can revel in all your newfound space.
Drive Angry
Still don’t have enough room? Well, Gmail isn’t the only storage hog in the Google Suite. Google Drive and Google Photos can fill up quickly if you upload images or other files in their full quality. If you use Photos, go into your settings and make sure that your upload quality is set to Storage saver. (This used to be called High Quality but Google, as it is wont to do, changed the name.) Keep in mind this means the images will be compressed into Google’s own space-saving but still high-resolution format, while Original means they’ll stay in the (usually better) resolution you shot them in.
Every Google Drive account has a storage dashboard you can use to monitor your usage. The landing page shows all of your files in a list, and clicking on the arrow next to “Storage used” on the right side will sort the list by file size, showing the biggest files at the top. It might also help to take a look at your “Shared with me” folder to look for large files or folders. You never know when someone might have shared 4 GB of very important photos.
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“If a Google Account has not been used or signed into for at least two years, we may delete the account and its contents,” Google announced in a blog post, and that time is coming soon. In December, the tech giant will begin removing inactive accounts along with their content across Google Workspace, which includes Gmail. The policy applies only to personal Google accounts — but for businesses like yours, that may result in a spike in bounces.
Why Google will start purging abandoned accounts
Google’s decision to weed out inactive accounts is another step the company is taking to prevent security threats like spam, phishing and account hijacking.
“If an account hasn’t been used for an extended period of time, it is more likely to be compromised,” Google’s VP of Product Management Ruth Kricheli explains. Abandoned accounts have weaknesses bad actors could exploit. Old passwords and a lack of two-factor authentication make them vulnerable and “a vector for unwanted or even malicious content, like spam,” adds Kricheli.
How to prepare and avoid a massive Gmail bounce rate
For businesses like yours that use email to connect with customers and prospects, Google’s move is a high bounce rate alert. With Gmail being the largest email provider in the world, your email list likely contains many personal Gmail accounts, especially if your business caters to consumers.
Email providers consider a bounce rate under 2% acceptable. But once you’ve crossed that threshold, your emails can start landing in the spam folder. Bounces tarnish your sender reputation, which is a 0 to 100 score Internet service providers (ISPs) use to determine whether you’re a legitimate sender or a spammer. The closer to 100 your score is, the more ISPs trust you as a sender – and deliver your messages to the inbox. Lower scores mean your emails could be spam.
So, how can you prepare beforehand and avoid emailing addresses that may bounce? Being proactive is much easier than fixing the damage.
Many businesses hold on to subscribers longer than they should. Having a sizable email list can give you a wider reach. However, in email marketing, engagement trumps such vanity metrics. Also, if someone hasn’t opened your emails in more than six months, what are the chances they’ll ever start engaging again?
So, segment unengaged subscribers and try to win them back with an enticing offer. Make sure you put it right in the subject line and preview text so they can’t miss it. Then, remove non-openers and keep only prospects who click. Before Google starts deleting them, it’s best to prune these accounts yourself to avoid any bounces.
Validate your entire email list
Observing how your inactive subscribers react to a targeted campaign gives you useful audience insights. But inactive subscribers aren’t the only risky types of contacts you could have on your list. Abuse emails, for instance, belong to individuals who tend to report many emails as spam. To avoid potential spam complaints, some email marketers prefer to weed them out using an email verifier.
There’s also the issue of temporary email addresses, which many people use to avoid giving out their real address. Temporary emails self-destruct and cause your emails to bounce, so deleting them from your database is good prevention.
On average, almost a quarter of your database goes bad yearly, according to ZeroBounce’s Email List Decay Report. The upcoming Gmail purge will only add to this natural data decay, so validate your list again to ensure it’s safe to use.
How Google will delete inactive accounts
While Google’s policy took effect in May 2023, it won’t affect inactive Gmail users until December. The tech company will delete abandoned accounts in several phases, starting with those people created and never used again. Could you have any such email addresses in your database? Check your email marketing reports. If any subscribers signed up for your emails but never opened your messages, remove them immediately.
Abandoned accounts are hurting your email marketing
As a business owner trying to reach your customers’ inboxes, you must always be aware of your sender reputation. Bounces and spam complaints affect it dramatically, but so does poor engagement.
When people don’t react to the emails you send, ISPs interpret that as an indication that your content isn’t helpful. As a result, your emails are more likely to go to the junk folder. That’s why email marketing best practices involve regularly pruning unresponsive subscribers. Their mere presence on your email list hurts your email deliverability. And when they’ll start bouncing, the damage will be even more severe.
So, reevaluate the health of your email list so that your newsletters and campaigns can make it to the inbox. The Gmail purge is the best reason to look into the quality of your contacts today.
Google account holders, beware: If you have an old Google account, you have only days to use it or lose it.
Beginning Dec. 1, Google will delete inactive accounts and all their contents, such as photos, calendar entries, e-mails, contacts and Drive documents, according to the company’s updated account policy. The system-wide purge is intended to protect users from security threats, such as spam, phishing scams and account hijacking, Google has said.
Here’s everything you need to know about how to keep your account active and save your data before the tech giant begins deleting inactive accounts on Friday.
Why is Google deleting inactive accounts?
Google is purging inactive accounts from its system because it says they are “more likely to be compromised.” Unattended accounts often rely on old or re-used passwords, receive fewer security checks by users and are 10 times more likely not to have two-factor authentication set up, Google’s internal data shows.
When an account is compromised, “it can be used for anything from identity theft to … unwanted or even malicious content, like spam,” the company said last May in a statement on the policy change.
When will Google accounts be deleted?
Google will start terminating inactive accounts on Dec. 1, 2023, according to the company’s notice on the updated policy.
It will begin by eliminating accounts that users created and then never revisited, the policy shows.
Which Google accounts are being purged?
According to Google’s new policy, “if a Google Account has not been used or signed into for at least 2 years… the account and its contents — including content within Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive, Meet, Calendar) and Google Photos” may be deleted.
However, the new policy only applies to personal Google accounts, meaning it does not affect school or business-managed accounts. In addition, Google will not remove accounts that have uploaded Youtube videos or have active subscriptions to apps or news services, the company’s updated account policy shows.
Affected users will receive “multiple notifications” that their accounts will be terminated before it actually happens, the company said in a statement.
How can I make sure my Google account isn’t deleted?
To make sure your Google account remains active, sign into your account and use one of the company’s tools such as Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos and Google Play.
Here’s a list of actions that will signal to Google that your account is active, according to the company’s account policy:
Reading or sending an email
Using Google Drive
Watching a YouTube video
Downloading an app on the Google Play store
Using Google Search
Using Sign in with Google to access a third-party app or service
How can I save my Google data?
Some Google users may want to download their data, or simply back it up while letting their old accounts expire. To do so, you can go to this Google site, which explains how to use its Google Takeout service to save your data.
Google Takeout will allow you to decide whether to download all your data, or if you want to save data from specific services like email or photos. You can also download the data to different services, such as Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive.
Elizabeth Napolitano is a freelance reporter at CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and technology news. She also writes for CoinDesk. Before joining CBS, she interned at NBC News’ BizTech Unit and worked on the Associated Press’ web scraping team.
Google is launching new security features for Gmail that the internet search provider says will make users’ inboxes “less spammy.”
Beginning in 2024, bulk senders who fire off more than 5,000 messages to other Gmail users in a single day will have to validate their identities and include one-click unsubscribe buttons in their emails, Google said Tuesday. The move will also help weed out attackers attempting to install malware by getting Gmail users to visit fraudulent websites.
Senders will be required to process unsubscribe requests within two days. Google also said it might not deliver senders’ emails that are frequently marked as spam and exceed the company’s “spam rate threshold.”
The move could block even legitimate mass marketers from clogging recipients’ inboxes. Ultimately, however, the goal is reduce unwanted spam and declutter other Gmail account holders’ inboxes, according to Alphabet-owned Google. Other email service providers, including Yahoo, will make the same changes come February 2024, Google said.
“These practices should be considered basic email hygiene, and many senders already meet most of these requirements. For those who need help to improve their systems, we’re sharing clear guidance before enforcement begins in February 2024,” Neil Kumaran, Gmail security and trust product manager, said in a blog post.
“No matter who their email provider is, all users deserve the safest, most secure experience possible,” Marcel Becker, senior product director at Yahoo, said in a statement. “In the interconnected world of email, that takes all of us working together. Yahoo looks forward to working with Google and the rest of the email community to make these common sense, high-impact changes the new industry standard.”
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Google will start deleting accounts that have been inactive for at least two years as part of a new security plan, the company announced Tuesday.
People won’t just lose access to their email, they’ll also lose content stored within Google WorkSpace, including Google Docs and Google Photos. Tuesday’s announcement is just a warning. Google said the earliest the company will start deleting accounts is December.
The change will only impact personal accounts, and will not impact accounts for organizations such as schools or businesses. Google will start by deleting accounts that were created but then never used again, and the company will send multiple notifications in the months leading up to a deletion. The notifications will go both to the Google email and the recovery email, if one exists for the account.
People who don’t want their accounts to be deleted should make sure to sign into inactive accounts. Google also shared some examples of activity for those already signed in, including reading or sending an email, using Google Drive, using Google Search and watching a YouTube video.
The move to delete inactive accounts is a security decision, Google said. Inactive accounts are more likely to be compromised because they’re more likely to use old or re-used passwords. They’re also 10 times less likely than active accounts to have two-step verification set up.
“Meaning, these accounts are often vulnerable, and once an account is compromised, it can be used for anything from identity theft to a vector for unwanted or even malicious content, like spam,” Google said.
This is among the latest security moves by Google. The company also recently announced it would offer passkeys, which are safer than passwords, as a login option.
Gmail users are mad about sponsored ads they say are now appearing in the middle of their inboxes, versus at the very top where they can more easily be distinguished from genuine emails.
Gmail has long selected ads it identifies as relevant to account holders based on their browsing activity, automatically displaying them in users’ inboxes while they are signed into Google. But now, instead of appearing in users’ inboxes under the free email service’s “Promotions” and “Social” tabs, the ads are popping up in between non-sponsored emails — and people who use Gmail are not happy about it.
Users on Twitter complained that the placement of the ads makes it harder to sort through one’s email and keep inboxes clean.
“As a person who works very hard to keep my email in check, I am absolutely incensed that Gmail is just putting random ads in my inbox now???” tweeted one user who shared an image of her inbox.
As a person who works very hard to keep my email in check, I am absolutely INCENSED that Gmail is just putting random ads in my inbox now??? pic.twitter.com/5LompTLLPL
In the photo, emails labeled as ads are intermixed with promotional emails from businesses that she said she likes receiving. About 3 out of 16 emails in her inbox is an ad, the image shows.
Another Twitter user called the new arrangement “annoying” and asked if the change was “a test” or something permanent.
“Gmail Ads are becoming annoying with ads in the in-between e-mail messages now. Is this a test or a gradual rollout?” he tweeted. He also asked folks on social media to recommend alternative email services.
“That doesn’t sound good”
After one user tweeted “Hey@gmail! Adding an ad into the MIDDLE of my email inbox is NOT COOL,” Google’s official account responded to the criticism, but did not provide a direct explanation for the new ad placements.
“That doesn’t sound good,” the company replied in part, directing the Twitter user to info on its support site on how Gmail ads work. The article explains that Google places “useful and relevant ads” in users’ inboxes in a “fully automated” manner. It does not address the positioning of ads.
Google did not immediately reply to CBS MoneyWatch’s request for comment.
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Google is now offering users the option of using passkeys instead of passwords to sign in.
Starting Wednesday, account holders can use passkeys to login to their accounts with a fingerprint, a face scan or a screen lock PIN. Passkeys are safer than passwords, and they are resistant to phishing, Google said.
“While passwords will be with us for some time to come, they are often frustrating to remember and put you at risk if they end up in the wrong hands,” the company said in a blog post.
Passkeys can only exist on specific devices. When someone signs in with a passkey, it proves to Google that the user has access to the device and is able to unlock it.
“Together, this means that passkeys protect you against phishing and any accidental mishandling that passwords are prone to, such as being reused or exposed in a data breach,” Google said.
For now, passkeys are just an option. Users who set them up can still login with passwords. In some instances, they may need to use a password because not all devices support passkeys.
Google noted that when a passkey is created on a shared device, anyone with access to the device who has the ability to unlock it will be able to login to the connected Google account.
“While that might sound a bit alarming, most people will find it easier to control access to their devices rather than maintaining good security posture with passwords and having to be on constant lookout for phishing attempts,” Google said in a blog post.
Users will be able to use someone else’s device to temporarily access their Google accounts by selecting “use a passkey from another device.” It won’t transfer passkey ownership to the new device, and will just create a one-time sign-in.
Currently, passkeys only work for personal Google accounts. Google Workspace administrators will soon have the option of enabling passkeys for users.
PayPal, Kayak and eBay are among the companies offering passkeys for login purposes.
