Gmail posts

E-mail addresses can tell people a lot about you.

Your username, or what's in front of the @ symbol can tell potential employers, dates and associates about your political affiliations, year of birth, what school you went to and even your affinity for elf culture.

Did you know that what comes after the @ sign can be more revealing than your cleverly chosen username?


A new trend report published by Credit Karma ranks e-mail domains by the average credit score of Credit Karma users. The data shows that BellSouth and Comcast users have the highest ratings, perhaps because they come with a paid Internet service.

Gmail comes in third, leading the pack of free e-mail services with an average credit score of 681, which is close to the average credit score for 45-54-year-olds and the average credit score for California, Oregon and Washington state.

As a people, we rely on Google for a lot. We count on the company to deliver information, email and more; but did you know you can now go after Google for your mistakes? That's exactly what one bank is doing after a teller accidentally emailed a document containing information on 1,300 accounts to the wrong address!

To top it all off, the bank still hasn't notified its customers about the data loss.

The Rocky Mountain Bank in Wyoming is suing Google to find out who owns a Gmail account that a teller mistakenly sent a document containing, "names, addresses, tax identification or Social Security numbers and loan information." After finding the error Rocky Mountain Bank sent an email telling the owner of the Gmail account to delete the sensitive information and followed up further asking the Gmail account holder to contact the bank to discuss the issue.

For a while Google has been protecting users of its popular Gmail service from phishing e-mails by rejecting any message it knows is fake from senders such as eBay and PayPal.

This week Google announced a new tool that makes it even easier to know if an e-mail is legit. Gmail users can now enable a new feature "Authentication icon for verified senders" which places a key icon next to e-mails that have been verified as "Super-Trustworthy" by Gmail.

Right now the Super-Trustworthy designation will only appear on e-mails from eBay and PayPal since they have completed the numerous steps needed to get verified, but the Gmail team expects to roll this designation out to banks and other senders shortly.

I have to admit at first I thought it was a scam: because Google is offering stickers free, if you send them a SASE. That's right, an old-school, 1980s-style self-addressed, stamped envelope (you'll only need a regular 42-cent stamp in the U.S., by the way). But it's on the official Google blog (and I double-checked by clicking through from Gmail). And what a cool offering to make your New Years' organizational process more fun.

Included in the free package: a sheet of the glittery Gmail icon stickers; three bookplate stickers; and a sheet displaying Gmail shortcuts for handy reference.

Now, to find a sufficiently fancy envelope. I'm thinking a nice little note to the engineers responsible for this project are in order!