Tag: gmail

Gmail and Drive – Email attachements now up to 10GB

The people over at Gmail have expanded their webmail service by joining in another service: Google Drive. They’ve noted on their official blog that you can attach files from your Google Drive account, which means the maximum file attachement size has been fourhundred-dupled from 25MB to 10GB. Hooray for big files users and movers!

When you attach a file from Drive, the platform is smart enough to check whether your recipients are able to access the file – when this is not the case you can change the file’s access settings right there from the interface without leaving the email. Quite convinient indeed.

 

 

 

Gmail email client introduces new compose and reply

Speed is important for the Gmail engineers, because they feel it’s important for the users. For that reason they’ve introduced a new compose and reply that pops up in a separate window:

gmail_email_client_new_compose_window

This way, when you need to refer to another email, watch for new emails coming in or want to work on multiple messages and save them, you can do that very efficiently in the Gmail interface.

Next to being more efficient, the new compose/reply window allows for easier message writing: the controls move out of the way when you don’t need them, so you can focus on your message:

gmail_email_client_compose_window

The same goes for replying to messages: you are now able to write a reply where the window expands vertically, keeping controls and such in sight. The new compose/reply will be rolled out as a preview at first, and will be available to all users within a few months.

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MailChimp posts major email providers trend update: Gmail on top, Hotmail declining

MailChimp has posted an update on their email providers trend: the number of emails their platform sends to each major email provider including AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail/Outlook.com, Comcast and Gmail.

Last year, no less than three of those email providers were running very close to each other: those were Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail.

However, last month Gmail had over 100 million more active accounts being sent to by MailChimp than Hotmail: quite a big difference! The raw numbers are 536,377,176 for Gmail versus 428,019,961 for Hotmail.

Here’s the email provider statistic running from July 2011 through to July 2012:

mailchimp_major_webmail_providers_trends_2012_email_marketing

Even AOL has grown by about 40 million, from about 59 million to 98 million last month.

The post does mention to take the numbers not too seriously:

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out some potential skewing of the numbers. For instance, we only track emails sent to some of the domains used by the email providers. We include hotmail.com and hotmail.co.uk, but not live.com, outlook.com, and some international domains. Google Apps users with private domains aren’t included either. So consider with a grain of chocolate salt — which is delicious, by the way.

Even so, the post does give some insight in the shift in webmail providers’ user base over the past 12 months. I wonder whether Microsoft can turn the tide with Hotmail now rebranded as Outlook.com.

One of the reasons Gmail has been growing so fast could be the number of Android devices being activated on a daily basis, needing a Google account (most of the time created with a Gmail email address): over 400 Million devices have been activated so far, with 1 Million being activated every single day. Wow!

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Google testing Gmail in search results

The ever experimenting minds of Google have come up with something new: to include Gmail in search results. As a Gmail user you can sign up for having Gmail included in your personal search results. Here’s an example, with Gmail results at right:

gmail_search_results_field_trial_google_email

The inclusion of Gmail in the search results will allow for the following:

- Inclusion of emails and shared links from Gmail
- Flight tracking of upcoming flights
- Contacts and their respective emails

Currently the trial is only in English and for @gmail.com addresses. The results are only summarized: contents of email are not shown, in case someone is joining you in screen time.

You can start the trial on this page. Search Engine Land has a nice rundown of the way it works here.

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Interview with Get Fractal founder Abs Farah

getfractal_logoThe following interview is with Abs Farah: one of the founders of Get Fractal, a UK company dedicated to making your life better. The way they do it is by taking your html and css you designed as a regular web page, and put it through the blender, and out comes email client friendly html and css. Yaay!

Here’s the interview:

Remy: Tell us a little about how did Fractal get started: the idea, the goals, the challenges.

Abs: Like most startups, the best problems to solve are those that you’ve experienced yourself. “Scratching your own itch”, so to speak. This was the case for us when we started Fractal. Whilst studying computer science at University, my brother and I did a lot freelance work in our free time. Mostly web based applications. However, at one point a particular client asked us if we could create an email marketing campaign for them, something we hadn’t done before. But we thought sure, it’s only HTML and CSS, how hard could it be? Read more