Gmail Signup blocked!

For registering into junk websites nd Forums/Blogs I was in need of a gmail-id. So visited Gmail’s “Create an Account” page, and was taken aback after seeing the message 😦

“Account Creation Failed. We were unable to create your new Gmail Account. We apologize for the inconvenience”.

Yes I cudnt create a new account in Gmail. I also tried in different OS nd browsers but all in vain 😦

I know Google would rectify this issue for SURE, so took a snapshot of the err message 😀 and uploaded it here.

I’ve also tweeted it here to check if anyone has noticed this issue, but yet to get a reply from my friends!!

BTW Gmail faced a system wide outage earlier this month and issues a straightforward apology here

Just wondering how Google itself could commit such mistakes 😉

Update: As I already mentioned in the post the issue has been fixed and I’ve successfully signed up a Google Account!! Google is fast enough to fix their critical issues 😉

Gmail Captcha hacked!!!

In one of my previous posts I wrote “Is Captcha Secure“. Now spammers have proved that its no way secure by hacking Windows Live Captcha used by Hotmail and now Google’s Gmail Captcha system.

Now the spammers/bots can automatically signup in Gmail and create random bogus accounts. Websense believes that from the spammers’ perspective, there are four main advantages to this approach.

• First, signing up for an account with Google allows access to its wide portfolio of services.
• Second, Google’s domains are unlikely to be blacklisted.
• Third, they are free to sign up.
• And fourth, it may be hard to keep track of them as millions of users worldwide are using various Google services on a regular basis.

Check out this link for more details on the tactics used by spammers to hack the Gmail Captcha system.

If u maintain a website do not use captcha to ward off spammers. You can follow either of the two approaches.

1. Instead of asking the user to type something, follow a image based approach. i.e., asking the user to click on the image in a given list. This approach is being used in Passpack while registration.

2. To tackle spam attacks on the comment form, the drop comment can be a solution.

Gmail 2.0 Rocks!!!

On Oct24th 2007, Google has announced that they are going to rollout a new version of Gmail. Now the new version is available to most of the users. The User Interface doesnt have any drastic changes but the performance has improved a lot. On the UI part Contact Manager has undergone a complete change. It is projected as a separate application which is going to be integrated across Google apps(Google Docs, Google Calendar etc.,). You can take a look @ the separate Contact UI here.

Below is the list of changes in the new version

• A new JavaScript backend for Gmail that will speed up performance, a big help for those who feel Gmail has gotten too slow.
• Email messages will be prefetched, so that when you click on them they will have already been downloaded, and will load instantly. When reading a message, you can click Next, Next, Next, and there’s no lag, speeding through a ton of messages instantly. You can even hold down the key and your mail flies by.
• A new contact manager will launch, integrating accross multiple Google products (including Docs and Calendar).
• More integration with other Google Products, such as opening email attachments in the appropriate Google Docs application.
• Looks exactly like Gmail does today, but under the hood it’s completely different.
• The speaker didn’t say when it’ll launch, just that it’ll be “very soon”.
• It should really shine “on the new MacBook Pros and the newest version of Safari”, taking advantage of new browser technology. Relevant information for a small market segment, but what about the rest of us?
• Uses the same text editor from Page Creator and Google Groups.

If u see a older version link at the top of the page then it means u can enjoy the new set of features.

Having launched Gmail2.0, IMAP support Google havent released all of its new features. Gmail engineers are working on new features which will be released sooon.

Lonut Alex of Google System found hints in the Gmail source code which has the following set of features.

1. Ability to chat with friends on multiple IM networks using Jabber Transport.
2. Colors for Labels.
3. Detaching messages from a conversation.

GSpace (A firefox extension which allows u to use Gmail space for file storage) which I mostly use doesnt work with the new version of Gmail. Eventhough ur login credentials are correct it will throw an error alert saying “Cookie Retrieval Failed”. As a workaround to make it work I did the below mentioned changes.

1. Login into ur Gmail account
2. Go to Preferences and change the language from English US to something(eg. English UK)
3. Save the settings.

After following the above steps u can use GSPace but u have to live with the older version of Gmail.

Let me know what do u like/dislike most in the new version of GMail 2.0