All your private and confidential emails are stored in your Gmail mailbox but are they secure? Can a Google employee working on the Gmail product read your messages?

In theory, the answer could be yes. Christopher Nguyen, who was earlier responsible for Google Apps operations at Google, shared this on Quora:

A small number of GMail related engineers have access to the servers as a matter of necessity to do their jobs; a very small number of people actually access the contents as a matter of necessity to do their jobs, and even then, almost always only the associated metadata.

The rest have to file a request and justify any access they ever need, which is extremely rare. All have to sign paperwork re users’ privacy at the risk of dismissal & legal action, knowing that whatever they do is discoverable. And ultimately, an internal culture of respecting users’ privacy helps keep one another in check.

Google also serves contextual text ads in Gmail and these ads are triggered based on the content of the email message that your currently reading. Obviously it is the bots that are scanning your Gmail messages for relevant keywords but Microsoft, with a hope that some Gmail users will shift to Hotmail, is using this point to target Google on privacy.

Some email services, like Gmail, actually read the contents of your mail (both sent and received, even if you aren’t a Gmail user but just sending to someone who is) in order to decide what kind of ads to serve up to you. They may call it “scanning” and attempt to equate it with less invasive activities like “checking for spam” but it’s quite different. For you, and the people you send mail to, it’s not spam, it’s personal.

Microsoft has also released a video, titled the Gmail Man, highlighting this Gmail behavior. Microsoft uploaded the video to YouTube, a platform owned by Google, and it isn’t therefore surprising that the video has garnered more dislikes than likes – after all, most YouTube users are also Gmail users and they aren’t buying Microsoft’s argument.

Related: Find if your Email has been Read

This story, Can Google Employees Read your Gmail?, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 02/02/2012 under GMail, Tech Notes.

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4. Does Google Read Email Attachments in Gmail for Ads ?
5. Gmail Adds Read Receipts in Google Apps Business

Rocky Agrawal has pointed out something very astute in a post from five days ago on Venture Beat: Google’s method for calculating the number of registrants and users of its social networking service Google+ is severely flawed. For instance, it can’t and shouldn’t count as registration for Google+ if you’re forced to do so while [...]

The Google Deception is a post from: PakMediaBlog All Rights Reserved.

Gmail offers an easy mail forwarding option that lets you auto-forward incoming messages to another email address. You define a rule (or filter) and any incoming mail that matches the filter is automatically forwarded to another address.

There are however some limitations in Gmail’s auto-forwarding feature:

1. You cannot auto-forward old emails. For instance, if you have a bunch of old emails that you would like to send to your EverNote or Instapaper account for archiving, you’ll have to manually forward them one-by-one as auto-forward only works for new incoming emails.

2. You cannot auto-forward to a non-verified email address. When you set up auto-forward in Gmail, it sends a verification message to the other email address before you can forward messages to that account.

Gmail Auto-Forward with Google Docs

If you would like to auto-forward Gmail messages (including the older emails) to another email address in bulk, or if you would like to forward them to another address without confirming, Google Docs can help you overcome those limitations very easily.

The trick is simple. You set up a trigger in Google Docs that watches some of the labels in your Gmail Inbox and as soon as it finds a message, it auto-forwards it to a designated email address. You just have to set it once and it then runs in the background without requiring any manual input.

Setting up Mail Forwarding – Step by Step

Create a copy of this Google Sheet in your Google Docs account and fill the columns A and B. You should put valid Gmail Label Names in column A and the corresponding auto-forward email address in column B.

Go to Tools –> Script Editor –> Triggers –> Current Script’s Trigger and Add a new Trigger. Set the Event as Time-Driven and choose either Minutes or Hours for the duration. If you want near-instant mail forwarding, set the timer to Every Minute.

Since you are running this Google Docs sheet for the first time, you’ll have to authorize it to access your Gmail account. Just follow the authorization prompts to grant Google Docs access to your Gmail.

That’s it. You can close your Google Docs sheet and it will magically forward your Gmail messages that are in particular labels. Once the message has been forwarded, the label will be removed automatically.

Video: How to Setup Gmail Forwarding with Google Docs

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wszZ1EaalQ

To quickly summarize, you set up one or more “watch” labels in Gmail and any emails that you add to these labels are automatically forward to the corresponding email addresses as you have specified in the Google Docs sheet.

This Google Docs based auto-forwarding method will work for both plain text emails as well as HTML mails that have attachments but there’s one limitation – the size of individual email messages that you are auto-forwarding should not exceed 20 KB. This is a requirement of the Google Apps Script service.

Also, mails forwarded through Google Docs will still count towards your Gmail’s daily sending limit which is around 500 messages per day.

Related: Mail Merge with Gmail and Google Docs

This story, How to Auto-Forward Gmail Messages in Bulk [Video], was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 05/01/2012 under GMail, Internet.

On 2nd January 2012, the 1st Monday of 2012, Mr. A (name changed for privacy) had planned to kill himself in front of co-workers because of whom (according to him) he had been overworked and unable to find that ‘special someone’. All that changed when the above Gmail advertisement appeared on a YouTube video he [...]

Gmail Prevents Suicides is a post from: PakMediaBlog All Rights Reserved.

Google recently updated their Gmail application to version 1.1 for the iOS. It includes custom sounds for notifications, nested label improvements and numerous bug fixes. Official Change log: Nested Label Improvements (iOS 5 only) A new custom sound for sound notifications Mobile Signature and Vacation Responder, accessible via the gear settings icon at the top [...]

If you are like me who uses Gmail for emails but not for chatting, there’s a simple setting that will help you completely remove (and not just hide) the chat box from your Gmail mailbox.

Go to your Gmail Settings page, switch to the Chat tab, choose “Chat Off” and click the “Save Changes” button. Alternatively, you may use this link to directly access your Gmail Chat settings page. You can re-enable chat in your Gmail by using the “Chat On” option.

This setting to disable chat may have been available in regular Gmail accounts for some time (am not too sure) but it was only recently added to Gmail for Google Apps accounts.

This story, How to Completely Remove Chat from your Gmail, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 14/12/2011 under GMail, Internet.

Ok, I will be first person to admit I wasn’t the biggest fan of Google+ when it came out. But despite all criticism thrown at it, it seems to have come out of that early phase and is slowly and steadily increasing its user base. With the addition of Google Pages, business of all size and popular websites are creating their pages on it. Looks like Google+ is here to stay. But how long before companies start touting their Google addresses publicly, in advertisements, in theaters, on TV? Google still has a long way to before it catches up with Facebook, but do we even know if its gaining on it? For example, how many of you have dumped Facebook in favor of Google+ yet? Not many I bet. The only reason I’ve seen people *really* switch is because they can’t stand Facebook, and it’s ok. Having 1000+ friends and gradually becoming overly-social can take its toll. But those users are a minority.

What Google+ is great at, admittedly, is gathering new followers. People add me almost daily over there. How many of them are spam bots, I’m not sure though. I love Google as a platform. I love Gmail, I use it all the time. Google Calendar is what drives my iPhone. Google Reader, Images, Videos, Scholar, you name it I use it. But what innovation will Google bring via Google+ that Facebook won’t replicate soon, and present it to its much larger user base? But I bet Google has a great plan for it going forward. We’ll just have to wait and watch.