If you already have a Google email account in the UK, you’ll soon have the option to switch your existing @googlemail.com address to the matching @gmail.com one, but you’re also free to stick with @googlemail.com. And starting later this week, anybody who signs up for a new account in the UK will get an @gmail.com address. Since “gmail” is 50% fewer characters than “googlemail,” we estimate this name change will save approximately 60 million keystrokes a day. At about 217 microjoules per keystroke, that’s about the energy of 20 bonbons saved every day!

We’ll be making this transition over the next week, and will update this post as the changes roll out. So to Aunty Pamela, Uncle Maurice, and everyone else in the UK, welcome to Gmail!

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Google released Buzz for Gmail and there are issues if you’re not careful with your settings as well as possibly unwanted group overlaps (I wouldn’t be too surprised if in the future, a less tech savvy family member posts a meant-to-be-private reply to a public buzz message of yours, because after all Google did integrate something very public into a product that was formerly rather private). However, Rome isn’t burning and Sergey Brin isn’t playing the fiddle, and yesterday I saw some people who apparently think that Google now simply reveals all your Gmail contacts, which isn’t true. Here are some things on the other hand which I understand to be true (please correct me if I’m wrong):

1. Again, Google won’t just reveal your Gmail address book to the world. Only if you opt-in to follow certain people who are suggested to you in Buzz do they have a chance to show up on your public Google profile as people you follow. If you’re e.g. a journalist who’s in contact with sources who like to remain anonymous, make sure you handle Buzz with care. Note others may follow you and thus show up on your profile, though.
2. Even if someone is shown to follow you in Buzz, it does not mean they’re your contact, or that you email frequently with them, or that you even know them. By default anyone who finds you in Buzz can follow you. If your competing company’s boss is showing up on your profile it’s not proof you’re looking to switch offices – the other party may simply be interested in what you have to say, similar perhaps to how they might follow your RSS feed if you write a blog.
3. You can decide to only write private group messages in Buzz, or if you don’t want to use it at all, you can turn off Buzz in your Gmail. For the latter, click on “turn off buzz” at the bottom of Gmail. Note though what Sam writes in the forum: “If you turn off buzz in your Gmail account it doesn’t change anything. All your posts stay on your profile and you can still comment on things via the profile … It’s literally only turning it off within Gmail.” (Does anyone know more about this point?)
4. You can turn off having contacts be shown on your profile. Just go to your profile settings and check off “Display the list of people I’m following and people following me”. (Note when I tried yesterday, this setting didn’t show in every account, I’m not sure why.)
5. Google is already rolling out changes due to feedback, making certain privacy related issues more visible in the interface. Per their blog post, now or soon, in the “How do you want to appear to others” dialog, there’s supposed to be a checkbox reading “Show the list of people I’m following and the list of people following me on my public profile”. (Does anyone know if this is checked by default?) Google might have rolled out this thing too aggressively – no test phase to wait for feedback first, and already “tens of millions of people have checked Buzz out”, according to Google – but the speed in which they react to this is good.

In the end, since Buzz arrived you might need to be a bit more careful now when using Gmail. Google may be aware of this trade-off but it looks like they’re really eager to get this social network/ messaging console out to casual users – remember, tons of less all-encompassing features start their life as opt-in Gmail Labs experiments where only early adopters might use them, but this one didn’t. I think it’ll be worth to continue closely watch privacy issues Buzz might raise.

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Today, we’ve come across more even more tips for working with Buzz, including how to add Buzz extensions to your web browser, new ways to subscribe to others’ Buzz, and even ways to update Buzz via email. If you’re becoming a regular Buzz user, then you’ll want to read through this latest collection of tips to take your Buzz skills up another notch.

First of all, a little known fact: did you know that Google Buzz is supposed to be spelled with a lowercase “b”? This comes from Google engineer Cedric Beust who posted this info to his Buzz yesterday. While that may be true, we’ve noticed that “Buzz” is capitalized in our Gmail inboxes to fit in with the other labels and it’s also capitalized on your own Buzz page and when you see the Buzz tab on someone’s Google profile. Frankly, we prefer it in capitals and until Google cleans up the inconsistencies throughout Gmail and Google Profiles, we’ll think we’ll leave it that way.

Now, onto the tips:

1. Get Buzz Browser Extensions

After only being live for two days, there are already web browser extensions for integrating Buzz into your Firefox or Chrome browser. As a Chrome user myself, I’ve been keeping my eye out for Chrome Buzz extensions – it seemed like Chrome would be the first one to get some sort of add-on. Yesterday, it finally did. In fact, it got two.

The first is the Chrome Buzzextension which adds the Buzz conversation bubble icon to your Chrome browser. When clicked, you can read through all the latest Buzz in the window that displays. Unfortunately though, this is currently a read-only experience. If you want to comment, like, or post new Buzz yourself, you have to head back to your Gmail. However, it’s a good first effort from the developer and worth watching for future updates.

A second Buzz extension for Chrome is called Buzzer. This lets you publish to Buzz from Google Reader. This one actually seems a little redundant since you can add your Google Reader Shared Items to your Google Profile and have them automatically published on Buzz. However, this would be useful if you came across a website that you weren’t subscribed to and still wanted to add it to Buzz. Clicking the button will open up the site’s feed in Reader and allow you to add a note (if desired) before posting the item to Buzz.

Meanwhile, Firefox users have an experimental add-on called “Buzz It!” which lets you update your status via Gmail with the link and title of the webpage you’re currently viewing. (Thanks to Orli Yakuel for finding this one.)

2. Hide Your Buzz Contact List from Prying Eyes

As Philipp Lenssen pointed out on Google Blogoscoped, Buzz may not be for everyone…especially those who don’t want to expose their private Gmail contact list to the world at large. The problem with Buzz is once you set it up, those you follow and those following you are shown on your profile page. This isn’t all that different from FriendFeed expect for one important fact: on FriendFeed you picked and chose who your friends were, but your Buzz contacts are added for you automatically based on who you email the most. If that’s not information you want to share, here’s how to turn it off:

1. Sign into your Google account via Gmail (or any other Google service)
2. Go to your Google profile here: http://google.com/profiles/me
3. Click the link at the top-right of the screen that reads “Edit Profile”
4. Here, you’ll see a checkbox that reads “Display the list of people I’m following and people following me.” To make this info private, just uncheck that box.
5. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the “Save changes” button

3. Update Buzz via Email

One of the nice things about Buzz’s Gmail integration is that it lets you update your Buzz via email. This one’s simple: just send an email to buzz@gmail.com using your gmail.com email address. You can even send in attachments!

4. Subscribe to Someone’s Buzz via RSS

As noted by commenter ArpitNext on our previous post, Google Buzz is RSS-enabled. If you want to subscribe to someone’s Buzz in your feed reader, just go to their Google profile page. Once there, you’ll see the orange RSS icon appear in the browser’s address bar. Click the icon in order to add Buzz to your favorite feed reader.

5. Email, Link to, or Mute a Buzz Post

To do more with a Buzz post, click the drop-down arrow to the far right of any post for a list of other Buzz options. From here, you can email the post, get the post’s permalink, view all Buzz from that person, follow them, or mute the post.

Update! Bonus Tip!

Our own Frederic Lardinois discovered that Google Buzz understands a little bit of the Textile Markup Language. Here are the markups he found that work:

(*)word(*) = bold

(_)word(_) = italics

(-)word(-) = strikethrough

(–) = em-dash

Note: Use those without the ()

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Recently we mentioned here how the word “buzz” turns out to be a reserved label in Gmail. Now, Gmail is rolling out a service by that name – Buzz – announced by Google some hours ago via video,blog post and help page. Buzz is meant to let you send messages and share status updates, photos, links and so on – think Friendfeed, Twitter or Facebook, but integrated in your email account.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Sharing something with your Gmail contacts, or publicly if you prefer, Google calls “posting a buzz”. You can also comment on, or Like the messages of others. And writing @ in front of a name directs your message to that person, as in Twitter (Twitter itself, by the way, is also integrated into Buzz). You can also send Buzz messages from your mobile phone. An API is available too.

According to CNet, Google’s Sergey Brin said that one of the most useful Buzz features for him is the ability “to start typing a thought right off the bat without having to worry about disrupting other people… I can throw something out there and the people who are most interested and most relevant tend to pay attention and reply.” Google’s recommendation system is supposed to surface the most relevant posts so that you’re “no longer acting as a human router of sorts but the back end does that heavy lifting.”

To try Buzz yourself, look for the left-hand navigation buzz link in Gmail. I don’t have it in my account yet so I wasn’t able to test it yet. “We’re still rolling out Buzz to everyone”, Google writes.

Friendfeed’s Paul Buchheit and Kevin Fox are not on Google’s paycheck anymore, but it looks like their work continues to be seen in Gmail. The screenshots here are from Google’s introductory video.

With all the features seemingly copied from other services, one starts to wonder if Google is on the road of stopping to invent new stuff and now merely cloning existing approaches and pushing it to their massive user base, thus battling competition. If Microsoft does similar GUI copying, aren’t they badmouthed for decades to come?

Then again, why should Google not go with time and utilize how the web evolved? If certain interface or communication approaches turn out to make sense, why not have them be spread widely, pushing forward the web’s progress? Also, I’m sure that the likes of Friendfeed and Twitter, in turn, got inspired by a whole lot of interfaces that were available to them when they brainstormed their GUI. And perhaps this whole thing should have been within email to begin with for ultimate casualness and mainstream adoption?

I guess we’ll find out what the answer was if in another 5 years, services like Twitter or Friendfeed ceased to exist. Another option, who knows, may be that the whole Buzz thing is just adding clutter and confusion to your inbox (where Buzz conversations may appear, too), not connecting the right contacts with whom you’d want to discuss news (I email with my family but may not want to talk to them about the latest developments from Silicon Valley), and blurring the lines between what’s private and what’s public, causing privacy mishaps and email paranoia.

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We believe you should only get the mail you want to get. Some of you already use the “Report Spam” button on all kinds of unwanted email, and for that we’re very thankful: the more spam you mark, the better our system gets at weeding out junk mail.

Unsubscribing from mailing lists and newsletters you subscribed to a while back but no longer want to receive should be just as easy. Searching through individual messages for little unsubscribe links is too big a pain —you should be able to unsubscribe with a single click.

So we just launched something that makes this all work better, both for Gmail users and big email senders. Now, when you report spam on a legitimate newsletter or mailing list, we’ll help you unsubscribe. After clicking report spam, you’ll see a little dialog like this:

Clicking “Unsubscribe” will automatically send a request back to the sender so they’ll stop emailing you.

This only works for some senders right now. We’re actively encouraging senders to support auto-unsubscribe — we think 100% should. We won’t provide the unsubscribe option on messages from spammers: we can’t trust that they’ll actually unsubscribe you, and they might even send you more spam. So you’ll only see the unsubscribe option for senders that we’re pretty sure are not spammers and will actually honor your unsubscribe request. We’re being pretty conservative about which senders to trust in the beginning; over time, we hope to offer the ability to unsubscribe from more email.

For those of you senders who are interested in this feature, the most basic requirements are including a standard “List-Unsubscribe” header in your email with a “mailto” URL and, of course, honoring requests from users wishing to unsubscribe. You’ll also need to follow good sending practices, which in a nutshell means not sending unwanted email (see our bulk sending guidelines for more information).

With an easy way to unsubscribe, everybody wins. Your spam folder is smaller, and senders don’t waste time sending you email that you no longer want.

Update (1:50pm): If you want to unsubscribe without reporting the message as spam, click “show details” in the top-right corner of the message, then click “Unsubscribe from this sender.”

A small inconvenience is that Google needs to include your primary email address in the headers and some mail clients inform users that the message is sent “on behalf of” a different address. Outlook is the biggest offender, especially for business messages sent from a a Gmail address “on behalf of” a custom domain.

Some suggested that Gmail should stop including the primary email address in the headers, but that’s a major faux pas, since Gmail needs to authenticate the messages sent using its SMTP servers. “The reason we include your address in the headers at all is to help prevent your mail from being flagged as spam by your recipients’ email services. For those who want the technical details, we use the ‘Sender’ field to be consistent with DomainKeys, a commonly used email authentication mechanism. If we didn’t do this, your messages may get sent to your recipients’ spam folders, which would be worse than the annoyance the current implementation is causing,” explains Google.

The solution for this problem is not very elegant, but Google implemented it: you’ll need to send the messages using the email provider’s SMTP servers. Go to Gmail’s settings page, select the Accounts tab, click on “edit info” next to the account you want to edit and then click on “Save changes”. For some reason, this doesn’t work for Gmail addresses and Google doesn’t make the changes behind the scenes.

“We recognize that your other address might not have a server that you can use to send outbound messages — for example, if you use a forwarding alias rather than an actual mailbox, or if your other email provider doesn’t support authenticated SMTP, or restricts access to specific IP ranges. For this reason, we’ve kept the original method as well,” mentions Gmail’s blog. The original method sends the messages using Gmail’s SMTP servers.

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New York Times reports that Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk are coming out of beta today. Google hopes to convince businesses that the applications are good enough to be used in a corporate environment. “For business customers, it is an important sign in terms of the maturity of our product offering and commitment to this business. I’ve had C.I.O.s tell me that they would not consider a product labeled beta,” explained a Google employee.

What’s in a name? Apparently, not much, since Gmail’s perpetual beta only meant that there are still significant features that need to be added. “We have very, very high standards for the product, as we do for all Google products. But we are not ready to come out of beta yet. There are a few things that we’re working on, and once we meet a couple more of those criteria, we would love to come out of beta,” said Gmail’s Product Manager Todd Jackson in March.

Making labels more familiar was probably one of the things that had to be changed before Gmail could finally be good enough to drop the “beta” tag. Keith Coleman, Gmail Product Director, has a longer list of features that had to be added: integrated chat, mobile versions, open protocols, better anti-spam technology, a more flexible architecture.

“Some people think we should wait until we launch < one of ongoing secret projects >. Others say that, over the last five years, a beta culture has grown around web apps, such that the very meaning of “beta” is debatable. And rather than the packaged, stagnant software of decades past, we’re moving to a world of rapid developmental cycles where products like Gmail continue to change indefinitely.”

If you think there’s something missing from Gmail’s logo, enable the “Back to Beta” feature from Gmail Labs to bring back the familiar logo. It’s that easy to pretend that nothing happened.

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1) New location for labels
You’ll notice your labels in a new location on the left of your inbox (or on the right, for those of you using the Arabic, Hebrew, or Urdu versions of Gmail). Instead of having their own section, your labels are now above your chat list, grouped together with Inbox, Drafts, Chats and other system labels.

2) Label hiding and showing
You now have control over which of your labels show. We’ve done our best to get you started by automatically showing the labels you use most and hiding the rest. Label hiding is my favorite new feature, since it saves me from having to look through labels I rarely use. If I ever need to reach any of my old labels, I just click the “more” link.

You can show, hide, or delete a label by clicking the down-arrow to the left of that label.

If you want to make a lot of changes at once, go to the Labels tab under Settings where you can edit labels in bulk.

For those of you who created label names like _stuff or ++todo++ to force your most-used labels to the top of the list (come on, you know who you are, I did it too…), you don’t have to come up with clever tricks like that anymore

3) Drag and drop
You can now drag messages into labels, just like you can with folders. This does the exact same thing as “Move to” — it labels and archives in one step.

You can drag labels onto messages too. It’s the same thing as using the “Label” button. To label or move many messages at once, first select the messages and then drag and drop the label.

It’s also possible to drag labels into the “more” menu to hide them and vice versa. If you only want to move a couple labels around, I’ve found it quicker than going to Settings.

All of these changes also mean the end of Right-side Labels, an experimental Gmail Labs feature. This is the first Labs feature we’re retiring. (The idea behind Labs was always that things could break or disappear at any time or they might work so well that they become regular features. More on that soon…) Now that labels aren’t in their own little box and take up much less space, moving them around the screen didn’t seem as important. We realize quite a few of you used and liked Right-side Labels, so if you feel strapped for left nav screen real estate without it, try turning on Right-side Chat in Labs instead.

We hope these new changes make labeling even easier and help you stay organized.

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With Gmail, you can send and receive messages up to 25 megabytes (MB) in size. Please note that you may not be able to send larger attachments to contacts who use other email services with smaller attachment limits. If your attachment bounces, you should invite them to Gmail,” suggests Google.

“When Gmail detects one of your messages is in a language other than your default language, you’ll see a header at the top of the message. Click the link that says Translate message to…. Your message will be translated inline (no need to open a new tab or window). Or if you want to translate the message and print it too, you can click the down arrow next to the Reply button and select Translate and print. You can also translate an entire conversation. Just click the globe icon on the right side of the conversation and you’re good to go,” informs the help center.

Gmail Blog Posts >

If all parties are using Gmail, you can have entire conversations in multiple languages with each participant reading the messages in whatever language is most comfortable for them. It’s not quite the universal translators we’re so fond of from science fiction, but thanks to Google Translate, it’s an exciting step in the right direction. I use this feature everyday to help me work with teammates around the globe (they think my Japanese is much better than it really is…shhhh!).

Whether you’re reading a family update from inlaws on the other side of the world, working with a multinational team, or just trying to bring about world peace, don’t worry, Gmail’s got your back.

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P.S : Don’t know how you’ll use it but its really going to help me with my Japanese Language classes…