GMail Slow

One of the reasons I switched from Yahoo! and Hotmail to GMail is the fact that it supports https not only at the time of login but also during the rest of the session. One advantage with this is, even if you send personal emails from anywhere outside home, no one would know what you are sending/receiving. Gives that extra level of privacy comfort if not anything else. However, last few weeks I have been observing performance problems with GMail. I have been using https for almost a few yrs now that I didn’t bother to try the http version. Today I tried the http version and to my surprise, it is much faster. Hopefully their https servers will continue to work faster, otherwise my incentive to use GMail would reduce given that now a ways all the other major email providers like Yahoo! and Hotmail (would it become Yahmail in the future? ) also started giving GBs of storage.

GMail Thinks Google Alert Is A Spam!

I have a handful of alerts setup. Today, one of those alerts ended up in GMail’s spam folder. I know spam filtering is not precise science, if not a rocket science. But, how hard would it be to recognize some of the internal emails such as Google’s own alert emails to be not spam? Unless, their spam engine starts figuring out which alert is a spam and which one is not!

Gmail is loading and loading and loading and …

These days, I am really sick of Gmail. It’s getting too slow. Like a bloated pig. After all, the 1gb which eventually became 2gb strategy is probably not working. Having to mine all that piled up mails (which probably most people just kept it there, like me, out of laziness to remove or with the may be useful one day attitude) to provide some contextual ads (and a few times some coofeefool ad or the other which has absolutely no relevancy), it perhaps is taking a toll on the Gmail servers. Most of the night times and more on weekends I keep getting the “Loading” red button on the top. What I hate most about that is that it covers the signout link and as a result, I can’t even sign-out when it’s slow! Today is the first time since I signed up for Gmail, perhaps 2+ yrs, that I actually composed a notes on Yahoo’s email (yes, I usually keep notes in drafts and that’s me, don’t ask why I do it).

Online Search Privacy

Recently AOL leaked a 3 months worth of searches conducted by their users, supposedly by mistake. Even though the usernames are not given out in the logs, there is a lot of criticism based on this article about how it became possible to derive the identify of a person based on the searches she conducted.

In case of AOL, the searches are tied back to the individual user based on the AOL account. Since Google doesn’t have subscription like AOL, is it safe to assume your privacy is safe with Google? Not so if you are using Gmail as well. Why? Because, when you login to Gmail and keep it open all the time like I do, then, everytime you do a search, Google would know that it’s you (with a particular gmail email address), that’s doing the search! And that’s scary. Isn’t it?

All the people keep complaining about this privacy issue. One way this could be resolved is, if you can have two separate instances of Firefox each running as a separte process and one not knowing about the cookies of the other. Perhaps due to various technical reasons this is not possible, but where there is a will, there is a way. Isn’t it?

On the otherhand, even if that was possible, would you want to keep switching between two separate browsers? That’s the whole reason why we all love the Firefox’s tabbed browsing functionality in the first place.

So, what can be done to be able to browse in a single browser and yet protect your privacy against Google? Or for that matter any other company that can track your usage of their free service based on your logging into another of their service?

I think, I found a solution. It’s basically the IE Tab plugin I talked about in my previous blog. Here is what you can do.

1. Get Firefox if you already don’t have one and install it.
2. Then download the “IE Tab” plugin mentioned above and install it, restart the browser.
3. Now, go to https://gmail.google.com/ and switch it to IE by clicking the “IE Tab”s icon at the bottom on the status bar.
4. Login to Gmail.
5. Now, open another tab and happly keep searching the web, and Google wouldn’t get your cookie of their gmail to track you.

How do you know if it’s working? You will notice that while in the past, when you visited Google’s homepage to search, you would see “Logout” link, now you will start seeing “Sign In” link. Google no longer knows that you logged in as IE’s cookie base is different from Firefox’s.

Of course, they can still use the IP address of your machine to try to corelate. But it’s a little less accurate than relating your searches to precisely you!