Google to give Gmail POP3 support, plans antivirus
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Google Inc. will roll out POP3 (Post Office Protocol) support gradually over the coming weeks to Gmail users, who will be able to use the feature to download e-mail messages
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Google said it fixed a bug yesterday in its Web-based e-mail service, Gmail, that allowed users to read the contents of other people's messages.
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Google has launched a new IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) service for Gmail that will allow users to sync Gmail with their e-mail clients.
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Google Inc.'s e-mail service is almost ready to accept all comers, nearly three years after the online search leader shook up the Internet by offering users an unprecedented amount of free storage and displaying ads based on the content of the correspondence.
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Gmail is a powerful webmail service that can be customized to help users better keep, label and filter their e-mail. Scott Spanbauer explains how.
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Google on Tuesday began marketing new online tools for protecting email from spam and other problems as it continued to encroach on the terrain of software king Microsoft.
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With POP3 support, Gmail users will be able to transfer their messages to a client-side e-mail application and store the messages on their local hard drives, making them accessible off-line.
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It bought Stata Labs and apparently plans to incorporate Stata technology in an e-mail client that could compete with Google&#39;s Gmail.
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(InfoWorld) - Google dropped the invitation-only restriction for its Gmail e-mail service on Wednesday, one of its linchpin applications complementing its popular search engine. Google launched Gmail in April 2004, and the company has been steadily integrating new features, but the service is still labeled a beta release. It includesÂ Google Talk, an instant messaging program, and a calendar, plus other features such as spam filtering. Gmail users previously had to pass along invitations to others so they could register for the service. The company has positioned Gmail as a gateway to other online offerings by displaying links to itsÂ Picasa photo sharing serviceÂ and Docs and Spreadsheets, a word processing and spreadsheet application. Google has concentrated on building its infrastructure for its service-based offerings. As of Wednesday, Gmail offered users about 2.8GB of storage space for e-mail, one of the more generous limits for free services.
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Google Inc. will roll out POP3 (Post Office Protocol) support gradually over the coming weeks to Gmail users, who will be able to use the feature to download e-mail messages from Gmail servers to e-mail applications on devices such as PCs and wireless devices.
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(InfoWorld) - Google has jumped into the anti-malware market, snatching up browser-based security software maker GreenBorder Technologies for an undisclosed amount of money. Officials with the search market leader confirmed the deal on May 29, but said that the two firms signed an acquisition agreement roughly two weeks beforehand. Google representatives would not provide further details about the deal itself or a timeframe for the GreenBorder acquisition to be closed within. GreenBorder, which is based in Google's hometown of Mountain View, Calif., announced news of the buyout on its Web site over the weekend. The company is a venture-backed provider of browser-based host intrusion protection (HIPs) tools for both businesses and consumers. Google officials said that the company moved to make the deal based on its perception that GreenBorder had a crack security software engineering team that could help boost security across all of its products. "This is pretty straightforward, it's primarily a talent acquisition for us, they have a small team of engineers that we were really impressed with," said Aaron Zamost, a corporate communications representative with Google. "The idea is that these guys have great expertise in the security domain which can provide obvious benefits to Google, its users and its advertisers." The company would offer no further details of its plan to integrate GreenBorder's security tools into its own products, which have branched far beyond search into Web-based productivity applications that compete with Microsoft's ubiquitous Office products. The Google Apps Premier Edition, launched in Feb. 2007, offers businesses e-mail, calendar, instant messaging and word processing capabilities. GreenBorder had been offering both a free consumer version of its programs, as well as paid editions of its applications marketed at enterprise users, including a version that specifically promised to secure computers using Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Outlook products for business users, dubbed GreenBorder Professional Edition. The software also runs in coordination with other browsers and Web-based e-mail systems, including Firefox. GreenBorder has pitched its technology as the security industry's "first desktop DMZ software for Windows" that promises to stop malware code from running on browser-based applications by forcing untrusted content sent through the programs to run in a virtualized protected environment. By running unknown code in such a "time-out" setting, where the content remains isolated from a local host and any trusted network it is connected to, GreenBorder claims to prevent malware programs from delivering their nefarious payloads. Any content arriving on a user's desktop from an untrusted source is visually hosted in a controlled virtual environment highlighted by a green border surrounding programs such as Outlook and IE. As with other companies previously acquired by Google, GreenBorder has halted downloads of its software. However, the firm said on its site that existing users will maintain uninterrupted access to its products with its support team is still available during the transition. The company said it will continue to support existing customers through the end of their current subscriptions to its software. "GreenBorder's proactive, always-on protection against malicious code is fundamentally more effective than reactive, detection-based approaches," Drew Hoffman, president and chief executive officer of GreenBorder told InfoWorld at the time of Professional Edition's 2005 introduction. "With the ever-changing, unpredictable nature of Internet-based threats, organizations are realizing that the race to plug holes in defenses can never be won," Hoffman said. Google has made a series of recent moves to boost its profile in regards to improving security for its customers, launching an official blog on the topic in May and issuing a research paper at the HotBots 2007 conference in Boston in April. According to the HotBots report, roughly one in ten Web sites that Google can find with its powerful Internet crawling technologies carries some form of malware. In late 2006, the company quietly began offering warnings to users about potentially dangerous sites found via its search engine in a manner very similar to McAfee's SiteAdvisor technology. While the company remains coy about its overall security aspirations, industry watchers said they were unsurprised by Google's GreenBorder acquisition as the HIPs technologies gained via the deal could be used to improve security for any number of the firm's products. "With Google moving into online software-as-a-service type applications that are all based on the browser, they're trying to show people that this platform is being secured," said John Pescatore, analyst with Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner. "They can combine these security tools with the online applications, as well as Google toolbar and Google Desktop, and promise a level of automatic protection for end users." The GreenBorder tools do represent a more aggressive form of security than traditional anti-virus technologies, but Pescatore said that users would still need to rely on a combination of both types of software to retain the malware removal capabilities of signature-based applications. The analyst pointed out that Google had previously experimented with applying HIPs technology in its browser-based toolbar via a partnership with WholeSecurity, which was eventually purchased by Syamtec in late 2005. While anti-malware market leaders Symantec and McAfee have both brought similar HIPs products in house via acquisitions over the last several years, Microsoft, which is aggressively expanding its security business, has not offered competing applications as of yet. Pescatore highlighted the fact that the software giant did take ownership of some HIPs capability through its buyout of anti-virus specialists Pelican in 2003, but said the company hasn't moved to launch any technologies as a result of the deal. However, the company may have something currently in development, he said. "Symantec and McAfee both have this type of host intrusion protection, but Microsoft doesn't, and this is the sort of thing that Google can point people to consider if they were worried about using Google Apps through a browser," Pescatore said. "Microsoft acquired HIPs technology from Pelican but never used it, but they've been looking in this area and will have something under development."
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By Michael Liedtke  Google Inc.'s free e-mail service will shed the final remnants of its invitation-only restrictions today, extending the reach of an increasingly popular product that has emerged as a vital cog in the online search leader's expansion efforts.
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Web search leader Google Inc. said on Wednesday it will soon make it possible for users of its Gmail service to check their e-mail via Microsoft Outlook or on certain handheld devices such as mobile phones.
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Google has fixed a bug in its Web-based e-mail service, Gmail, that allowed users to read the contents of other people's messages.
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By Aimie Pardas  IT started off with Webmail. No longer did I have to worry about configuring the POP3 settings or other information just to be able to get my e-mails. And no matter which computer I used, I had an up- to-date mailbox at my fingertips.
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(InfoWorld) - Accounts on Google's Gmail can be easily hacked, allowing any past -- and future -- e-mail messages to be forwarded to the attacker's own in-box, a vulnerability researcher said Tuesday. Dubbed a "cross-site request forgery" (CSRF), the Gmail bug was disclosed Tuesday by Petko Petkov, a U.K.-based Web vulnerability penetration tester who has made a name for himself of late. In the past two weeks, Petkov has publicly posted information about critical, zero-day bugs inÂ Apple's QuickTime, Microsoft's Windows Media Player andÂ Adobe Systems' Portable Document FormatÂ (PDF). According to Petkov, who declined to release details about the vulnerability, attackers can use Gmail's filtering feature to exploit the bug. An attack, he said, would start with a victim visiting a malicious Web site while also still logged into his Gmail account. The malicious site would then perform what Petkov called a "multipart/form-date POST" -- an HTML command that can be used to upload files -- to one of the Gmail application programming interfaces, then inject a rogue filter into the user's filter list. Petkov posted a series of screenshots on the Gnucitizen.org site that illustrated one possible attack. "In the example, the attacker writes a filter, which simply looks for e-mails with attachments and forwards them to an e-mail of their choice," Petkov said. "This filter will automatically transfer all e-mails matching the rule. "Keep in mind that future e-mails will be forwarded as well. The attack will remain present for as long as the victim has the filter within their filter list, even if the initial vulnerability, which was the cause of the injection, is fixed by Google," he added. Google did not immediately reply to questions about whether it had confirmed the vulnerability, and if so, when it would patch the problem. At least one user commenting on Petkov's posting, however, claimed that a Firefox extension could block exploits of the Gmail bug. Giorgio Maone, the creator of the popular NoScript add-on, said that his extension blocks CSRF attacks from untrusted sites, which a malicious page likely would be. (NoScript blocks JavaScript, Java, other scripting and executable content from running from untrusted sites; Firefox users can download it from theÂ Mozilla add-on site.) As he did last week when he disclosed a major bug in Adobe's pervasive PDF file format, Petkov again defended his decision to post information about the Gmail flaw without first reporting the vulnerability to Google. The reasoning, however, was oblique: "Let's say that it is just one of my social experiments." Jeremy Grossman, the chief technology officer at San Jose-based WhiteHat Security, said that the Gmail flaw is "especially scary." In an entry to his blog, Grossman explained further: "Web mail accounts are in many ways more valuable than a banking account because they maintain access to many other online accounts (blog, banking, shopping, etc.). [Attacks exploiting this vulnerability would be] simple, silent and extremely clever." Petkov added his own two cents on the bug's implications. "In an age where all the data is in the cloud, it makes no sense for the attackers to go after your box," he said. "It is a lot simpler to install one of these persistent backdoor/spyware filters. Game over! They don't own your box, but they have you, which is a lot better." Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Google announced new pricing for its Postini hosted e-mail security and compliance management package on Tuesday in hopes of pushing more customers to consider a move to the SaaS (software-as-a-service) offering.Since adding expanded message filtering, encryption, and archiving tools to Postini's traditional anti-spam services in Oct. 2007 -- and parceling the same features into its Google Apps Premier hosted productivity suite -- the company has been able to convince a significant number of customers to begin working with the SaaS applications, according to Scott Petry, founder and CTO of Postini, which Google acquired for $625 million last July.However, in a move to make the tools more attractive for use in heterogeneous IT environments, and to encourage both enterprise and smaller customers to consider the offering as a viable alternative to traditional on-premise technologies, the company has revamped the product packaging and cut its overall pricing.In addition to pushing pricing for its flagship hosted anti-spam filtering service to $3 per user per year, Google-Postini has moved the price for its hosted virus detection, outbound processing, and content policy management services to $12 per user per year.For its compliance-oriented message data archiving, retention, and e-discovery services, which previously cost $100 per user per year, the firm has drastically cut pricing to $25 per year with the option to extend e-mail archiving at a cost of $10 for every additional 12 months of storage."We've got a healthy number of our existing customers running the newer content management, archiving, and discovery services, but we think that by adjusting pricing, we can get even more people get off their existing infrastructure and get onto managed services offered by Google," Petry said. "We won't be an acquisition that withers and dies; we're focused on expanding our reach and integrating the product line."The combined package of services is meant to compete not only with Postini's traditional rivals, including mail filtering capabilities offered by MessageLabs and Microsoft, but also with security and compliance products marketed by industry stalwarts like Symantec, Petry contends.A customer might have to buy Symantec's standalone anti-spam, anti-virus, messaging security, DLP (data leakage prevention) and policy management technologies to gain the same collection of filtering, archiving, and compliance automation capabilities offered in the Google-Postini SaaS package, according to the executive.By driving down pricing and tying the tools tightly together, Google should be able to convince some large customers to make a shift to SaaS and be able to help smaller companies gain access to tools they may not have been able to afford previously, he said."More than a battle against any of these other guys, this is about getting more companies off of the traditional model of deploying software and appliances to address these problems," Petry said. "We think that time is on our side, and more people than ever are ready to move to thin, in-the-cloud services; we're not trying to get everyone converted overnight, but we have set of technologies to help those who are ready augment their current infrastructure."Google plays up POstini's security benefits As with other security SaaS services, Google-Postini also maintains that its expanding set of message filtering tools can offer customers a unique advantage in terms of protection via the company's ability to see new threats arriving on the networks through its individual users and then leverage intelligence about any emerging threats across its entire client base.In addition to being integrated directly with Google's Apps technologies, Petry also stressed that the company remains dedicated to providing its messaging security services to users of other vendor's e-mail and collaboration infrastructure, including Microsoft's Exchange platform and IBM's Lotus Notes architecture.Some industry watchers may still question the abilities of hosted services providers like Google-Postini to handle complex security tasks such as DLP, but the executive maintains that the SaaS model actually gives his company a major advantage."This is about the democratization of these tools, making them cheaper and allowing more people to use them and protect their investments in existing appliances," he said. "Financial services companies have spent billions trying to do DLP, but now other companies without the same level of internal sophistication or budget can get us for less; we can minimize the amount of hardware necessary for DLP and allow them to use their existing appliances to integrate with us via API."Google-Postini partners said that it may still be early in the game in terms of selling the message filtering, archiving, and discovery tools to enterprises, but they contend that SMB customers should view the pricing move positively.Joe Vaccone, president of Excel Micro -- which resells Google-Postini to other services providers that cater largely to SMBs, said that many customers are both looking for new features to address issues like compliance and to move away from other e-mail filtering vendors who may be getting squeezed from the market."A lot of the older anti-spam vendors are getting clobbered and looking to exit, so I think we might see a lot of companies coming over to Postini because they can get a lot of functionality at a single price point that they may not have been able to obtain before," said Vaccone. "We already see a lot of people looking for new alternatives in this space based on the performance of what they've been using."Vaccone said that Excel Micro's reseller customers are also seeing more of their own clients inquire about Google's Apps platform as licenses to older products, namely Microsoft's Exchange and Office technologies, run out. "We do see some migration to Google Apps going on and believe it will continue," he said.Industry analysts agreed that Google-Postini's revamped pricing and integrated SaaS tools should find favor with SMBs first but said that the work necessary to convince enterprises to buy-in will likely take longer.The Google-Postini marriage carries a lot of credibility in terms of the involved technologies, but large customers will need to be convinced that the company is serious about growing its enterprise footprint, said Rebecca Wettemann, analyst with Nucleus Research."Google-Postini is definitely looking to grow into the enterprise, and spam and e-mail security services like this are ideal for delivery on-demand, but there remains a real challenge for them to gain the trust of enterprises and make them confident that they are a serious player," Wettemann said."The more they can highlight references to existing Postini customers who have moved into the new services, or point to new enterprise customers, the easier it should become," she said. "But they need to show how these innovations they claim deliver value, that it's more than Google throwing cash at some interesting technologies."