About a decade ago, spam brought email to near-ruin. The contest to save your inbox was on, with two of the world’s biggest tech companies vying for the title of top spam-killer. By February 2012, Microsoft boasted that its spam filters were removing all but 3 percent of the junk messages from Hotmail, the company’s online email service at the time. Google responded by claiming that its service, Gmail, removed all but about one percent of...

We've all been there. We've sent an email or message with a hot head, or made a big error (eg: emailed the wrong person), and realized the big...

No matter how much Google does to harden its servers, hire the world’s best security engineers, and root out hackable bugs in its products, it can’t stop dummies like you and me from handing our Gmail passwords over to the first cybercriminal who slaps a Google logo on a fake login page. But now, for users of its Chrome browser at least, it’s trying a new method to protect our passwords from ourselves.

Would you think me a hopelessly humorless curmudgeon if I confessed that the Internet’s aggressive celebration of April Fools’ Day — which gets a little more aggressive each year — hasn’t improved April Fools’ Day for me? For one thing, you know in advance that the day is going to involve one damn prank after another, eliminating the surprise element that makes good April Fools’ Day pranks entertaining.

The Chinese government appears to have blocked the ability of people in China to gain access to Google’s email service through third-party email services like Apple Mail or Microsoft Outlook, which many Chinese and foreigners had been relying on to use their Gmail accounts after an earlier blocking effort by officials, according to Internet analysts and users in China.

A couple of years ago, right around the time Google’s Gmail team decided to start working on a standalone email app — the recently announced Inbox — a major redesign of Gmail was launched. As is the case with all Google products it was first released internally as “dogfood” to let Googlers themselves digest all the new features, or as was the case with this particular redesign, the removal of most of the advanced features.

Gmail represents a dying class of products that, like Google Reader, puts control in the hands of users, not signal-harvesting algorithms.

Google has released an update to its search app for Android and iOS that searches the phone's Gmail account for dates of bills due. It works as a reminder, pulling in notations from the calendar and scanning emails for related words, similar to the way it targets advertisements in Gmail that run down the right rail.

Google has lifted its requirement that new Google users also create a Google+ account, Marketing Land reports. When you sign up for a Gmail, Google Docs, or other Google account, a new "No thanks" button lets you opt out of Google's social network.

John Henry Skillern was arrested last Thursday for the possession of child pornography. The 41-year-old restaurant worker was allegedly sending indecent images of children to a friend, but while it was police in Houston, Texas that obtained a search warrant for Skillern's tablet and computer and placed him in custody, it was Google that tipped them off to his illegal activities.

A federal judge in New York has granted prosecutors access to a Gmail user's emails as part of a criminal probe, a decision that could fan the debate over how aggressively the government may pursue data if doing so may invade people's privacy.

The Gmail API could turn our email accounts into gold mines, and that's a good thing

Google's email breakthrough was almost three years in the making. But it wasn't a given that it would reach the public at all. If you wanted to pick a single date to mark the beginning of the modern era of the web, you could do a lot worse than choosing Thursday, April 1, 2004, the day Gmail launched.

An email comes in. It’s important. Not like, oh-god-drop-everything-or-we’ll-all-die important, but it’s something you should probably answer. But you’ve got stuff to do right now, so you don’t. “I’ll answer this tomorrow,” you tell yourself. By tomorrow, the email has dropped down to the bottom of your inbox, replaced by 100 way less important things. You’d still answer it… if you hadn’t totally forgotten about it. It happens to the best of us.

Gmail is the webmail service of du jour for many people, and it's hard to imagine when it wasn't an indispensable part of the workday. But when Google launched the service on April 1, 2004, many people thought it was a hoax.

On April 1, 2004, Google launched Gmail and almost immediately changed the way people use email. Gmail accomplished the tricky feat of staying ahead of the competition technologically while growing to become the world's largest email service.

When Groupon’s third-quarter revenue missed analyst expectations, CEO Eric Lefkofsky finally acknowledged the obvious: Recent changes to how Gmail filters marketing emails were hurting the deals company. The changes arrived in the second quarter of 2013, when Gmail began automatically placing promotional emails, such as Groupon’s, in what is essentially a separate inbox called “Promotions.”

Google touts a new Gmail feature as enhancing security. What it really does is open a new privacy hole -- one that exposes your email reading habits.

The latest version of the web's favorite email client comes with a host of new features, ready to help you reach Inbox Zero. But with new updates rolling out every month or so, it's hard to keep track of the latest tools. Just when you think you know it all, one little change can completely impact your whole experience.