Down Time

Google has fixed an issue with Gmail that caused a small percentage of its accounts to repeatedly send email messages over and over.

The bug, which affected less than 2.5 percent of the Gmail userbase, according to Google, involved odd behavior including the repeated messages. The bug was resolved Thursday night, according to Google's Google Apps dashboard.

"The problem with Google Mail should be resolved," Google's tech support staff wrote. "We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better."

The bug affected at least two writers for PCMag.com, who initially dismissed thoughts of a bug, suspecting that their PCs may have become infected with malware. The repeated messages also resulted in several Gmail users being added to spam lists, including www.Backscatterer.org and www.SORBS.net, according to WgtnDan, a user who posted to the Google Gmail support thread describing the problem.

At a press conference announcing the integration of Google Voice and Gmail this week, Google executives were asked about the number of Gmail users. Executives declined to provide an exact number, although comScore numbers cited by The Wall Street Journal put the number at over 160 million, putting the maximum number of users affected by the bug at about 4 million users.

You may have seen slightly less spam coming into your email inbox recently, but those messages were more likely than usual to contain a virus, according to a report by Google.

The amount of spam being transmitted dipped slightly in August and September, the study found. Spam in the third quarter of the year was down 24 percent compared to the same period last year, the report said.

In August viruses in emails processed by Google increased by 111 percent, compared to the same month last year, the company said in its statement. Google's system blocked a record-setting 188 million emails containing viruses in just one day.

This malware is increasingly being housed in messages purporting to break news about a celebrity's death. The virus can unleash itself when the recipient clicks on a file attached to an email.
For the study, Google analyzed more than 3 billion messages processed by its system each day during a three-month period.

We know facebook is now introducing its new service call E-mail Inbox. Which is quite getting news from most of the Tech Experts that its a new battle between Google and Facebook.

Facebook is supposedly launching an email service this coming Monday and the hype is pretty high at this point. With many young users leveraging the Facebook inbox as their primary messaging service rather than email, why would Facebook find it necessary to launch their own email service on Monday? One answer is that Facebook needs access to the inbox to determine individuals’ true authority and influence.

If the rumors are correct, this might explain why Facebook and Google have been going at it recently with concerns to user data. Google has been preventing Facebook from importing Gmail data, and perhaps this is because such a feature would help people migrate from Gmail to Facebook email with ease.

Is Google right to be worried? We won't know for sure until Monday, but, in the meantime, here are five ways Facebook email could keep Gmail on its toes:

• Smarter Conversation View 
• Groups Integration
• Integrated Bios
• Photo Slideshows
• The "Like" in Links

Update:
Facebook has now updated its name server to publicly reflect that the company owns the domain name. Facebook would have to make it public within 24 hours of any product launch, which means that many people are now expecting Facebook to use the fb.com domain as part of any email product released on Monday.