E-mail Archive for Faster Forward - Technology News, Observations and Occasional Rants by The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro

Microsoft to open Outlook data format

Microsoft announced Monday that it plans to pry the locks off the closed, proprietary format of its Outlook e-mail/contacts/calendar/tasks/notes application. By documenting the workings of Outlook's Personal Storage Table (PST) format--one of my least-favorite locked formats--Microsoft would make it far easier for developers to write Outlook-compatible software to complement or...

Sounds Like Gmail Had a Case of the Tuesdays

Users of Google's Gmail service got an unanticipated boost in their productivity yesterday when an outage knocked the e-mail site offline for an hour or so in the afternoon. For people accustomed to the boring predictability of a seemingly infinite Gmail inbox, seeing the site cough up only vague "server...

Gmail Edges Past AOL, Still in Third Place

News flash: Google's Gmail is not the most popular Web mail service. Or even the second-most popular option. It is, however, now the third-most popular Web e-mail application, according to new figures from ComScore covered by multiple sources on Friday. Gmail's 37 million visitors a month badly trail the 106...

Gmail, Other Google Apps Escape Beta Status

If you have a Gmail account and you haven't checked it yet today, log in and see if anything on that site looks different. Notice anything missing? Do you feel a vague sense of absence when you gaze over your inbox? That's right: The "beta" subtitle that has graced the...

Gmail Makes Labels Act More Like Folders

Before I take leave of this computer for the long weekend, it's time to attend to one of the most contentious issues on the Web: the Gmail folders-versus-labels controversy. Since Google launched its free Web-mail service on April Fool's day of 2004, it has insisted that Gmail's labeling system--in which...

Gmail Gunning For More Users With Auto-Import Feature

Yesterday, Google's Gmail service added a feature that may earn it a lot of new users -- and some jealousy or outright hostility from competitors. If you open a new Gmail account, you should now be offered the option of copying your old mail and contacts from another mail service,...