Kuwaiti Gmail user Abdulaziz Al-Shalabi inadvertently gained access to 30 other accounts over the weekend. Courteously, Al-Shalabi quit poking around others' inboxes after he got bored looking at "keycodes for some embassy gate" and usernames and passwords, he told News.com. Google flack Jason Freidenfelds blamed a local ISP for the security glitch. eBay accounts were exposed, too, but company flack Nichola Sharpe wants you to know: "It wasn't a major problem .. .not anything on a large scale." But you might want to doublecheck before shipping your Beanie Baby collection to the Middle East, just in case. (Photo by the illustrious untitled13)

"There's no good reason in the world for Gmail to still have the beta tag. It was supposed to have gone away a long time ago." — Paul Buchheit, Gmail's first engineer and the originator of Google's "don't be evil" motto. [Google Operating System]

Logo designer David Airey took a monthlong trip to India starting in late November. About three weeks in, hackers took over his Web domain, davidairey.com. How'd it happen? Airey blames a Gmail security flaw he read about. Something to do with going to a malicious website that inserts forwarding filters into a user's Gmail settings. Totally messed up his life, he says, not to mention his rank in Google search results. Google says it's fixed this particular flaw, but here's how to make sure you haven't been affected.

The Freakonomics blog and search-data company Hitwise found that there are quite a few Gmail users who accidentally end up at GM.com when they mean to go to Gmail.com. In fact, 0.94 percent of GM.com visitors go to Gmail.com on their next page load versus 0.14 percent for Toyota.com to Gmail. No word from GM, but it's doubtful that any of these accidental visits turned into purchases. (Photo by AP/Paul Sancya)

Over the weekend, Google began trying out a new product called Google Profiles. The move seems prompted by jealousy over all the buzz Facebook is getting. And sure enough, Google may just have come up with something creepier than Facebook's Beacon.

BrainyQuote.com purchases Gmail text ads with little quotes. They do not however know what "funny" means.

Google, the world's most wonderful or evil company, has greylisted popular web host company Dreamhost, even while it claims that levels of spam are dropping overall. (Dreamhost is a ten-year-old company that hosts more than half a million websites on more than 1500 servers.) The greylist (which means that mail sent through Dreamhost to Gmail is delayed by hours or days while it is assessed for mass-spamming) was imposed more than two weeks ago by Gmail; it was triggered because so many Dreamhost users forward their mail to Gmail, which made Dreamhost look like a spammer. Dreamhost announced the problem on November 17, and has talked with Google support, and yet it's still not resolved. This seems like evidence that Google's infrastructure has major trouble—how is it possible that it takes more than two weeks to remove a legitimate source of mail from a greylist?

Google claims that the amount of spam coming into Gmail is subsiding after several years of significant growth. Spam, as a percentage of email sent to Gmail accounts, has started to drop. Other analysts, including Forrester Research and Yahoo, think spam is on the rise, but less is making it to users' inboxes because of better filtering. Google, for example, can delete a spam message across its entire network once it's been reported by several users. However, a rise in "bacn" — agreed-to but unwanted notifications from services like Facebook informing you, say, that you've been poked — will increase the amount of stuff in our inboxes.

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That's what's happening to me. Maybe someone figured out my password, or maybe it's a technical glitch, but my Google password has been changed. I joined Gmail in college, so I used a school address as my secondary address. Years later, I finally need that password-reset email but the address is long dead. And Google's policy is to make me WAIT FIVE DAYS while someone could be wreaking havoc on my life before I can answer my security question and get my email back.

Gmail is increasing storage allocations for Google Apps accounts and speeding up the storage increases for standard Gmail accounts. I'm excited to get more space — I'm currently taking up 52 percent of my 2.7 gigabytes — but why now? With competitors offering free unlimited storage, Google is falling behind in webmail features. In August it started offering paid upgrades to Gmail. But why pay for space if you can get unlimited from Yahoo, gratis? Our guess is that the pay-to-play storage service has fallen flat, now that customers are used to getting the world for free. And that speaks to another problem for Google: Why did it want to charge in the first place? Some people whisper that Gmail may not be generating as much advertising revenue as people hoped.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer slams Google because they "read your email" to provide contextual ads in Gmail and Microsoft's Hotmail doesn't. Oh Steve, you're just bitter because Google got away with something you never could. And its ad-targeting software is smarter than yours. [CRN]

Gmail may be introducing larger mailboxes. Of course, Google's 10 GB seems paltry compared to Yahoo and AOL's new unlimited-email storage. [Infectious Greed]

A growing number of Gmail users are reporting problems with hacked accounts. Password hacking, of course, isn't a new threat. And users ought to be cautious with login information. But what's making users of Google's email system especially frustrated is the company's molasses-slow, user-unfriendly support after their accounts are hacked.

Yes, Gmail is now open to all comers — invitations not required. You can even get it if you're unfortunate enough to live in "a swath of Asian and South American countries where the Mountain View-based company previously limited the number of users." That's no reason to create a promotional clip that's among the most inane things ever posted to Youtube, which is a momentous achievement in its own right.