Everyone, that is, except for Mr Matthew Brock of Swiss Cottage. I have it on good authority that the gentleman in question, an old friend of mine, is giving Google+ a miss.

It’s not that he dislikes social networking as such. He long ago signed up to Facebook with only a cursory grumble, and he’s frequently to be found sharing photographs on Twitter (@_mattbrock, if you’d like to be friends). But he tells me he’s uneasy about Google’s continued expansion into ever more online markets – and, in this case, about its acquisition of a huge amount of personal information to add to its already vast database. He has therefore decided to be a conscientious objector.

As podcast listeners will know, when it comes to issues like this, my personal privacy policy is “get over yourself”. If Google’s gurus reckon they can make money from me uploading pictures of Mike Jennings in a daft hat then I say good luck to them. Even as I nodded sympathetically along with Brock’s explanation, I admit I felt he was being perhaps a little paranoid. Did he really suppose Google had some evil master-plan?

Little did I imagine that within 24 hours I’d be eating those, er, thoughts.

Changing details

My epiphany began innocently enough that evening, when I decided to change my email address. This isn’t something I do very often, but there comes a point when a mailbox receives so much spam there’s nothing to do but abandon it and move on.

There comes a point when a mailbox receives so much spam there’s nothing to do but abandon it and move on

I should have realised I was opening a can of worms when I discovered there’s actually no way to change a Gmail address. To move to a new address, you must open a new account. That only takes a minute, but I was piqued to find I was unable to migrate my contacts, and to transfer my mail across I had to set up a rather roundabout POP3 transfer.

That wasn’t the only problem, as I realised when I tried to move my Google+ account to my new address. It turns out this isn’t possible either: each profile is permanently linked to the Google account it was created under. Since my Google+ profile was only a few weeks old, it wasn’t exactly stuffed with memories, but it was still irritating to have to ditch it and start afresh.

At that point my phone chirped to tell me I had a new email, and it hit me: my phone too was tied to my old Google account. A quick web search revealed that the only way to set my new address as my primary account would be to perform a factory reset and set the phone up again from scratch.

In the end, moving to a new email address meant losing access not only to my archives and my Google+ account, but also to my Android Market purchases, my Google Docs, my Google Calendar and my Google Checkout history. I also ended up losing all my stars on Angry Birds. (It may have been this realisation that really made me question the wisdom of allowing Google to control so many different services.)

Big mistake

To be fair, the root of the problem isn’t Google’s size as such, but the way it ties its services together. A well-designed database should use some sort of anonymous internal value, such as a serial number, as the key field, so that personal information can be freely modified without breaking the links between tables. Google appears to have ignored this fundamental principle, instead using the email address as the key field. That’s quite literally a schoolboy error – I learnt about key fields way back in GCSE Computer Studies – and Google should be ashamed.

But it wouldn’t be a problem if Google weren’t tying everything together in the first place. Facebook, Twitter and even PayPal accepted my new address without a murmur. If only Android were similarly decoupled from the main Google database, I’d still have my golden eggs right now.

So – to my admitted surprise – I find myself in sympathy with Brock’s position. I’ve never really believed that a big company must necessarily have a malicious agenda; but now I realise you don’t need a plan to cause havoc. With the best will in the world, people – and hence companies – make stupid decisions from time to time. The bigger we allow Google, or any company, to grow, the more scope those stupid decisions have to screw us all.

Update: I’m most grateful to Alan Robertson, in the comments below, for pointing out workarounds for some of the problems mentioned above. The latest version of the Android Market application (which, oddly, doesn’t appear to be available from the Android Market itself) does indeed allow you to install purchased applications from multiple accounts – although this of course means you have to keep your old Google account active alongside your new one, which is a pain.

More usefully, as Alan also mentions, if you have an Android phone or tablet you can configure it to sync your contacts and calendars from your old account – then switch over and resync them to your new account. I’m not sure how you’d do this without an Android device though, as importing contacts directly across Gmail accounts isn’t supported. And it’s still the case that to switch your primary account you must perform a factory reset.

In all, it seems Google is gradually addressing the problems involved in using multiple or changing identities, but there’s some way to go. And, as I mentioned above, the problems are largely ones that in a more diverse market would never have arisen in the first place!

I kept my account open because various website registrations were still linked to that account, but I’ve seen nothing to tempt me back into regular use. Quite the opposite in fact. In the past few months alone, both a colleague at work and my girlfriend have had their Hotmail accounts hijacked and used to send malicious links to everyone in their address book.  Microsoft insists this problem is industry-wide, but I’ve never seen a Gmail account hacked in such a manner.

Microsoft knows this is a serious problem: today it’s announced a series of “upgrades” to Hotmail’s security… that don’t go anywhere near far enough, in my opinion.

Why not force people to change their Hotmail password, say, every six months? “That’s not something we plan to enforce,” said Fyfe, without offering any explanation as to why not.

Microsoft claims the main reason people like my girlfriend have their accounts hacked is because they never change their relatively insecure password. “Eighty percent of attacks on compromised accounts come from people who’ve had their password guessed or phished,” Hotmail product manager, Fiona Fyfe, told me, before confessing that: “until recently, I hadn’t changed my password for over a decade”.

So, if even Hotmail product managers don’t follow best security practice, how’s it going to convince customers to regularly change their password? “We’re going to be really proactive about promoting this,” said Fyfe, adding that customers will be prompted to beef up the strength of their password.

Why not force people to change their Hotmail password, say, every six months? “That’s not something we plan to enforce,” said Fyfe, without offering any explanation as to why not.

Likewise, Microsoft is following Gmail’s lead, by offering customers the chance to have their messages sent over a secure socket layer connections (HTTPS). Unlike Google, however, Microsoft won’t make this the default account setting – you’ll have to manually switch it on. What possible reason could Microsoft have for not switching on encryption for everyone? Microsoft promised to get back to me with a full answer to this question, when I was first briefed on these security measures on Thursday. I’m still waiting for an answer. (Update at 4pm, 28 Sep: Microsoft now claims SSL will eventually be turned on by default, but cannot give a specific timeframe.)

To be fair, Microsoft is introducing other measures that should make a difference. If the company spots your account was accessed in, say, Mexico City at 4:30am and Moscow at 5am, it will lock the account on the fairly safe assumption that you’ve not borrowed one of Branson’s spaceships and your account’s been hacked.

It’s also extending its rollout of single-use codes, for when you access your Hotmail at an internet café or other high-risk public PC. Instead of leaving yourself at the mercy of keystroke loggers installed on the PC, you can get a one-off code sent to your mobile phone, and sign-in with that instead.

That’s magnificent – but this naturally means entering your mobile phone number into Hotmail. And if someone does manage to break into your account, they’re going to get access to your mobile phone number too. Fyfe insists Microsoft will lock the account if it detects any suspicious activity and that nobody will be forced to hand over their mobile number, but admits there “is always a risk” hackers might get their hands on your phone number if they manage to crack your password.

“I would personally feel more comfortably putting my details into Microsoft property than other properties on the internet,” Fyfe argued. I can’t say that I agree.

However, this system wasn’t working for two main reasons. Firstly,  it would take a good ten minutes after Windows loaded before I could read my emails as Thunderbird/CloudMark downloaded them and filtered out all the spam.

I’d also ended up with my emails spread across two laptops and a desktop, with parts of my email database also existing on older desktops. This can be a nightmare when it comes to finding a conversation or software licence from a year or two ago.

What I wanted was a service that allowed me to handle my emails online, so that I could access them from anywhere. This solves both problems as there’s no separate download, so start-up is instant and the entire database is in one place.

I signed up for a Google Apps Premier trial and was instantly impressed. Within a couple of hours I’d configured one of my spare domain names to act as the base domain so that emails could be sent and received via username@mydomain.net rather than username@googlemail.com. The Premier edition also integrates with Postini, a service Google bought that allows the domain controller to set up email policies and filters and adds an extra level of spam elimination.

Each of the users has set up filters and labels within Google Mail to organise emails as we work towards a zero inbox policy. We’re each able to redirect up to five other email addresses into our Google Mail account and send emails from those email addresses within Google Mail.

Overall, it’s been a triumph. Gone are the long start-up delays, the slow performance of a creaking desktop email client and the fragmentation of the email database. Junk removal is almost 100% effective, due to the combination of Google Mail’s excellent built-in technology and Postini. It’s dead easy to set up filters so that mail is archived properly and the archives themselves are simple to search. And, of course, I can easily check my email from any internet-connected computer as well as my Android phone.

In fact for us at least, Google Apps Premier has been worth the £2 per month per year purely for its email functionality. This is just as well because the other elements bundled into Google Apps are, frankly, pants. Google Docs is unusable, Google Sites is of no practical use to us and we have no need for a private Video channel, thank you very much.  The only fly in the rose-scented ointment is that there is no obvious way to backup the Google Mail database.

In practice, Google Apps Premier (and, to a lesser extent, the free Standard edition) allows the smallest business to enjoy similar functionality to a large corporate running Exchange Server at a very low price. So far so good.

I’m going to battle on for a few more days before I deliver my verdict on Buzz. But several people have already emailed/Tweeted us to ask how to turn Buzz off.

The answer is simple but relatively well hidden.  Drop down to the foot of the Gmail page and you’ll find a tiny link marked “turn off Buzz”.

If you need any further instruction, you really shouldn’t be using the computer without adult supervision.

The hissy fit between Google and the People’s Republic of China has been in the news – including the “quality papers” a good deal lately. So, I went to see what’s new at Google for mail users, and spent a while looking around the extended features offered in its Labs, where you can find the stuff Google thinks is going to be cool, neat, and realy useful for those of us who have failed to compress the whole of our existence down to the 140 character limit of Twitter.

It was the sudden flip to using HTTPS which really put me in mind of the comparisons with other email products. HTTPS, Google says, is the answer to concerns over the security of people’s emails, and it had long intended to turn the feature on were it not for the inherent processing overhead to that type of network traffic.

Adding https to the list of featues scattered around in the Labs – which includes offline access to your Gmail inbox and cached sending of outgoing mails when a link to the net is unreliable – put me in mind of my very early exposures to computer-based email. And those were pretty early. I can remember going to demos of DECNET, with them breathlessly telling us about DEC employees who had met and then married via DEC’s world-spanning internal email system made out of VAXes.

The most obvious comparison, though, was with Lotus Notes. Back in the nineties, I was managing a Notes system with some pretty high-profile data chuntering about in it, and teams of guys dialling in to pick up and drop mail from Namibia to London.

We even had a case of user identity theft in the middle of a legal dispute, which was rapidly shut down by a bit of careful RTFM to re-stamp the legitimate user with a new certifier key, thereby locking out his illicit doppelganger once and for all. Comparing the Notes architecture back then (all of which is still in the product, even now) with what Google is laboriously developing, as if there were no prior art, is pretty illuminating: Notes does smart replication between servers and clients, works offline or in low-bandwidth connections admirably well, secures the inter-machine traffic with robust levels of encryption, doesn’t have to sit on top of protocols used for other things, stamps messages with irrefutable digital identities so you can verify who the sender really is. These are all things which SMTP (on the one hand) and webmail over http (on the other) are struggling to reproduce, the best part of 20 years later.

This is of course, why Ray Ozzie got the top job at Microsoft. Design one thing that stands the test of time on a global basis and you too can change the world. It seems an appalling indictment on the illusion of progress that Google has to slowly churn out the same product, in public, with lives and freedom at risk as it tries to fit everyone in the world into its cosy Californian version of freedom.

Before Ozzie joined Microsoft (which was when I met him), he was exceedingly proud of what had been achieved in the aid programmes for the Indian Ocean countries, by using Groove. This was his successor to Lotus Notes, and was a key example of a “light touch” technology for people with “too much IT”, as he put it. In a very quiet and successful deployment, people in organisations as diverse as the US Navy and the government of Sulawesi had been able to collaborate across otherwise insurmountable systems and security barriers, by signing up – securely and quietly – to Ozzie’s Groove initiative.

The contrast with Google’s approach could not be more stark.

To access GMail Labs, click on the little green science beaker icon next to your email address at the top of the GMail window.

1. Quick Links

Quick Links is an excellent tool for power users. It allows you to create one-click shortcuts to specific searches – so you could, for example, have easy access to any emails mentioning your company or a particular person. To create a Quick Link, type your search term into the GMail search bar and then click Add Quick Link from the Quick Links box in the left-hand panel (which only appears after you’ve enabled the Quick Links feature).

2. YouTube/Flickr/Picasa previews

To save the bother of opening up a new tab or window every time the office joker sends round a new YouTube video, this handy feature allows you to watch the video inline from the foot of the email message window. Simply scroll down when you receive a YouTube link and find the little player at the bottom of the message. There are similar previews available for links to photos stored on Picasa and Flickr.

3. Tasks

In a fairly naked attempt to borrow one of the more popular features from Microsoft Outlook, Tasks allows you to create a basic to-do list that pops up in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. You can set due dates, print your entire task list and manually change the order of tasks using the Actions menu.

4. Offline

Laptop-wielding commuters will appreciate offline access to their inbox. Offline access creates a local copy of your inbox on your PC, allowing you to read your entire inbox even when you can’t reach an internet connection. You can also compose messages while you’re offline, and store them up in the Outbox until you reconnect. This could obviously consume a fair bit of hard disk space, and it can take a fair while to synchronise your inbox the first time you do it. The feature is dependent on Google Gears, which (irritatingly) isn’t supported in the latest version of Firefox (3.5) at the time of publication.

5. Title Tweaks

A small, but potentially invaluable, Labs feature. Title Tweak changes the order of the words in the GMail header, so that your browser tab will now read “”Inbox (20) – dave@GMail.com – Google Mail” rather than “Google Mail – Inbox (20) – dave@GMail.com”. This means you can instantly see how many messages are waiting in your inbox when you leave a GMail tab open in your browser, or from the Windows XP/Vista Taskbar.

6. Inserting Images

Inserting Images allows you to embed pictures directly into email messages rather than adding them as attachments. A small icon appears in your taskbar, and you can either upload images directly from folders on your PC, or insert an image URL from a website. Pop-up options allow you to conveniently resize the image on the fly.

7. Forgotten Attachment Detector

Sounds like a novelty feature, but it saves you from the embarrassment of those: “And this time I’ve attached the photos I promised” messages. This add-on scans your email text for phrases mentioning attachments, and brings up a pop-up balloon reminding you to clip on an attachment if you’ve forgotten to do so before hitting send. Clever, if not exactly 100% foolproof in our tests.

8. Custom label colours

Labels – GMail’s alternative to folders – are very useful and this nifty add-on allows you to customise your label colours, rather than relying on GMail’s defaults. It also gives you the handy option of renaming your labels, which doesn’t appear by default.

9. Navbar drag and drop

This feature really comes into its own when you start enabling various Labs experiments. It allows you to drag and drop the various boxes where you want them in the GMail interface. So if you don’t bother with GMail chat, you can drop it down to the bottom of the screen and promote your Quick Links (see tip 1) shortcuts instead.

10. Custom Keyboard Shortcuts

Not over-enamoured with GMail’s default keyboard shortcuts, such as the rather cumbersome “gi” for go to inbox? Create your own using this feature, which adds an keyboard shortcuts tab to your settings menu. Stupidly, installing this add-on doesn’t automatically turn on your keyboard shortcuts, leaving you beating the keys in frustration for the first couple of minutes, until you realise you have to switch on the keyboard shortcuts in the General tab of settings too.

Google, as ever, has the answer. A new GMail Labs feature called Back to Beta that “soothes the soul by putting the familiar beta sticker back on the Google Mail logo”.

Nice work.

(Thanks to PC Pro forum member MattLevy for the tip off)

Sign up for you Gmail account, click on “settings”, and head to the “accounts” tab.  There’s a section entitled “Get mail from other accounts” and you’ll want to click “Add a mail account you own”. Where you’ll be presented with the following lovely box.

In the “Username” type in your Hotmail email address. In the “Password ” box, your Hotmail password. In the “POP3 Server” box enter “pop3.live.com” without the quotation marks. Then set the Port to 995. You’ll also want to click “Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail.” Then save the changes.

That’s it. Kick up your feet and wait for the emails to start trickling in. This bit can take a few hours depending on how much info gets pulled across, whereas sifting through all that mail and labelling it can take days, unless you select it all and press archive. My preferred option.

And just as a footnote, guess how much space my twelve years of emails took up in my new inbox. 38MB. Excellent, only 7,300MB left to go then.

The graph taken from Twitscoop below shows how quickly word spreads when Google’s mail service takes a nap:

With Twitter, it seems you can’t sneeze without someone reporting it. 

“I’d send you this statement by email, but I can’t”.