Official Gmail Blog
News, tips and tricks from Google's Gmail team and friends.
Serving better ads in Gmail
January 20, 2010
Posted by Steve Crossan, Gmail Product Manager
Ever since we launched Gmail, we've tried to show relevant and unobtrusive ads. We're always trying to improve our algorithms to show better, more useful ads.
When you open a message in Gmail, you often see ads related to that email. Let's say you're looking at a confirmation email from a hotel in Chicago. Next to your email, you might see ads about flights to Chicago.
But sometimes, there aren't any good ads to match to a particular message. From now on, you'll sometimes see ads matched to another recent email instead. For example, let's say you're looking at a message from a friend wishing you a happy birthday. If there aren't any good ads for birthdays, you might see the Chicago flight ads related to your last email instead.
To show these ads, our systems don't need to store any extra information -- Gmail just picks a different recent email to match. The process is entirely automated: no humans are involved in selecting ads, and no email or personal information is shared with advertisers.
We've updated a help center
article
and
a
few
faqs
where we had specified that ads alongside an email were related only to the text of the current message. This doesn't change the
Gmail privacy policy
. We've also created this short video explaining the change:
We'll be rolling this out over the next few days. With this change, we hope you see better ads in Gmail -- more of what you're interested in and less of what you're not.
Default https access for Gmail
January 12, 2010
Posted by Sam Schillace, Gmail Engineering Director
In 2008, we rolled out the option to
always use https
— encrypting your mail as it travels between your web browser and our servers. Using https helps protect data from being snooped by third parties, such as in public wifi hotspots. We initially left the choice of using it up to you because there's a downside: https can make your mail slower since encrypted data doesn't travel across the web as quickly as unencrypted data. Over the last few months, we've been
researching the security/latency tradeoff
and decided that turning https on for everyone was the right thing to do.
We are currently rolling out default https for everyone. If you've previously set your own https preference from Gmail
Settings
, nothing will change for your account. If you trust the security of your network and don't want default https turned on for performance reasons, you can turn it off at any time by choosing "Don't always use https" from the Settings menu. Gmail will still always encrypt the login page to protect your password. Google Apps users whose admins have not already defaulted their entire domains to https will have the same option.
To read about other steps you can take to protect your accounts and your computers, visit
google.com/help/security
.
Note: If you use offline Gmail over http currently, the switch to https is likely to cause some problems.
Learn more
about this known issue and how to work around it.
Gmail on Nexus One
January 5, 2010
Posted by Anna de Paula Hanika, Android Product Marketing Manager
Not only does the
just-announced Nexus One
have a beautiful display, snappy processor, and five megapixel camera complete with flash and geotagging, but you can also buy it online with or without a service plan. Plus, it runs Android 2.1, which adds a couple of new features to the native Gmail application:
Quick contact badge: Press the contact status icon within Gmail, and a handy box shows all of the ways you can reply to a contact — including email, chat, SMS, and Facebook.
Voice input: Swipe the keyboard, then just speak to select contacts or write an email, complete with punctuation. Period!
Nexus One also features the Gmail updates of Android 2.0, including:
Multiple Gmail accounts: Sync multiple accounts to the same device and switch between them without leaving the app.
Undo: A handy 'undo' link makes it easier to retrieve messages when you hit archive or delete by mistake. (Note: you can't yet
undo send
as you can with the desktop version of Gmail).
For more information on Nexus One visit
google.com/phone
. To learn more about Gmail on this and other Android devices, check out the
Gmail page
on mobile.google.com/android, or watch this video:
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