I haven’t noticed this myself today, but it appears at least a subset of Gmail users are inadvertently drawing closer to an inbox with zero unread e-mails thanks to a nasty bug that marks messages as read even before the user opens them.

Former TechCrunch writer Ouriel Ohayon was one of the first to signal the bug on Twitter – with many of his followers echoing the phenomenon – and a quick search shows other users are seeing the same thing.

You know how I know that we’re reaching the limits of email innovation? Because Gmail is now devoting much of its time to embarrassment prevention in Gmail Labs. The latest is another small, but useful feature that they’re humorously calling: Got the Wrong Bob?

As the name implies, when you turn this feature on in Labs, Gmail will scan an email’s recipients to see if you are accidentally sending a message to someone you don’t want to be sending it to. Here’s a good example of when this will be useful: Michael Arrington often sends the TechCrunch writers emails about stories but sometimes he’ll include Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis in those emails when he means to include TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid. Typing in “Jason” populates Calacanis first, and Mike usually doesn’t realize it until it’s too late.

We’re now a little over a week into the extended roll-out of the preview build of Google Wave. This is an important time for the service because many people can now finally start using it as they eventually may — which is to say, with their friends and colleagues. Of course, the backlash is also already in full-swing, as expected. But I can’t help but wonder if this backlash and the hype that it is a byproduct of, is blinding some to the larger picture. Google Wave is not just a service, it is perhaps the most complete example yet of a desire to shift the way we communicate once again.

I loaded up Gmail this morning expecting to see the usual assault on my inbox, when something new caught my eye. Apparently, Google has started inserting favicons, the little icons that many browsers put next to a website’s URL or bookmark, next to messages.

So far, I’m only seeing it for emails from Netflix. As you can see below, their Gmail favicon matches their website favicon. Others are seeing it too, but again, only for Netflix right now.

Push Gmail support for the iPhone is finally here. And you have Microsoft to thank.

No, Push support has not finally been added to Apple’s Mail app for the iPhone, that would be too easy and make too much sense. Instead, it appears that Google is once again working around Apple to provide customers with some functionality, this time by way of its Google Sync product.

Email. Twitter. Instant Messaging. Facebook. Those are just four of the most popular ways to communicate online. And actually, the average 23-year-old has 6 different accounts that they check for messages each day. Maintaining and keeping up with that is either basically impossible, or flat-out impossible. That’s where Threadsy comes in.

Launching its large beta today at TechCrunch50 as a free web app, Threadsy wants to take all of your online communication and shove it into a single service. All of the messages directed at you (email and Twitter @replies, for exmaple) will be put into a single stream of message, called the “inbound” column. Meanwhile, all of the activity streams that you simply follow (Twitter, Facebook, etc), will be put into a single activity stream, the “unbound” stream. The result is one service to rule them all.

The Gmail blog has a post up right now that’s interesting for a few reasons. First, it was posted around midnight of a Friday (this is supposed to be my no-news quiet time, Google). Second, it’s written as a chat exchange between two Google employees. And third, it has a kick-ass new Nintendo-esque theme.

Truth be told, the Nintendo-like theme (called “High Score”, undoubtedly to prevent any trademark lawsuits), makes Gmail nearly impossible to read — at least at night, when the background is all black (below). But it’s awesome having a Mario-esque backdrop and Space Invader-like guys are your buddy chat indicators.

When Gmail went down today, it caused more than a minor panic. People, like me, who use Gmail as their primary email couldn’t get much work done. There’s nothing like an outage to make you realize how much you rely on something.

So what happened exactly? Isn’t Gmail supposed to have multiple points of failure? Well yes, Gmail has thousands and thousands of overlapping mail servers which can pic up the slack if any one fails because the data is replicated and spread all around. But there are also request servers which do nothing but route the requests for email to whichever server (with the right emails on it) happens to be available.

It tuns out that Google took down some regular email servers for routine maintenance, and because of some recent changes, that overloaded the request servers. Google engineering VP Ben Treynor explains on the Gmail Blog:

So, as the entire web seems to be talking about at the moment, Gmail is down. But what’s amazing is the volume of people talking about it. When I first noticed it being down, I did a Twitter search and just minutes later there were over 10,000 new results. A couple minutes later, there were over 20,000.

It took a few minutes for it to show up on Trending Topics, but now it’s there, but it was giving Twitter Search fits. For a while, if you clicked on “Gmail” in Trending Topics, you would have seen “No results for [blank]” returned. If you hit it again, it kept stacking the messages on top of one another (pictured below).

I tried to log on to Gmail this morning and this is all I’ve been getting for the last hour or so. Anyone else seeing this?

Judging from the response on Twitter and a general search, it appears there are indeed some problems with Gmail throwing server errors (503 and 500) left and right, but it doesn’t seem to be as widespread as the February outage was (yet). But at least I’m not the only one noticing and the Google Apps Status dashboard also acknowledges the Google Mail service has been spotty for a while now.

Gmail made a tweak last night that brings better contact management to the service. When you click the “To:” or “CC:” links in front of each address field, a box pops up with your contact list. It is a simple change, but it saves you from having to go to another page to find a contact.

Most of the time, Gmail users probably won’t use this feature because Gmail already gives you a list of auto-complete suggestions as you begin typing in a name into the “To:” field. These are based on people you’ve communicated with recently, and usually does the trick. But if you haven’t emailed someone for a long time, their name doesn’t pop up. It also doesn’t help if you can’t remember their name.

Good thing Gmail is out of beta. It is now the third largest Web mail service in the U.S. In July, Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL, according to comScore estimates. (Gmail is the orange line in the chart below). That puts Gmail within sight of the No. 2 player, Windows Live Hotmail, which has 47 million unique visitors. After that there is a wide gulf separating Yahoo Mail and its 106 million monthly unique visitors.

The last time checked on Gmail’s progress was at the beginning of the year, when it seemed like it would still take at least two years for it to catch up to its nearest rivals. But so far this year, Gmail’s unique visitors grew 25 percent, while AOL’s declined 22 percent. Thus, the two crossed paths in July. (Hotmail grew only 8 percent during the same period, while Yahoo Mail increased unique visitors by a healthy 16 percent).

There’s some excitement around the web today among a certain group of high profile techies. What are they so excited about? Something called WebFinger, and the fact that Google is apparently getting serious about supporting it. So what is it?

It’s an extension of something called the “finger protocol” that was used in the earlier days of the web to identify people by their email addresses. As the web expanded, the finger protocol faded out, but the idea of needing a unified way to identify yourself has not. That’s why you keep hearing about OpenID and the like all the time.

But those standards, while open, have failed to latch on in a meaningful way with the public at large. One of the holdups is that you have to set up a website or service you use to be your OpenID. It’s relatively easy to do, and you may already have one ready to go, but just not realize it. But it’s still kind of tricky to explain to a regular web user — wait, you login with your website?

Google is clearly enamored with the netbook space. We already know that it’s serving as an entry point for the new Chrome OS, but Google isn’t just going to sit around and wait for that, it’s starting to optimize its experience for netbooks already.

Tonight, Google has just released a small new feature in Gmail Labs so that users can optimize their email service for viewing on netbooks. It’s a small, but noteworthy setting as netbooks have become popular, yet most still run sites just as full-sized laptops would. Gmail’s engineers apparently had a problem with that, so they launched the new “Remove Labels from Subjects” feature.

I expect many of you already were aware of this, but I can imagine at least some of you aren’t yet, so here goes: apparently you can lift the usage restrictions from Adobe PDF files by simply forwarding them as attachments to your Gmail account and opening them in HTML mode right from your inbox. That way, you can copy whatever the ’secured’ PDF contains to a text editing program and do whatever you want with it.

For your reference: PDFs (Portable Document Format) can be encrypted so that a password is needed to view or edit its content, and they can also contain embedded DRM restrictions that provide further controls that limit copying, editing or printing.

Anyone who has ever tried to use Gmail as a central hub for their Email has likely fallen prey to one of the service’s annoying flaws: there was no way to use another site’s outgoing SMTP servers to send Email. For the vast majority of people this wasn’t an issue — Gmail was happy to send your Email for you from your Gmail account, along with message indicating that it was being sent “On Behalf Of” your other account. But those three words were still there, serving as a constant thorn in our sides. And to make matters worse, it could also confuse people: they might start sending messages to your Gmail account rather than your primary Email address. Today, you can kiss those “On Behalf Of”’s goodbye, as Gmail has just started allowing users to send their messages from third party SMTP servers.

If the previous paragraph confused you, here’s an explanation: Many people like to use Gmail’s web interface for their Email but don’t have the option of using Google Apps on their mail server, especially when it’s for their work account.

We’ve been covering the new web email project MySpace has been working on in stealth mode for the past several month. Now it’s ready to begin a quiet rollout today, in beta, for users around the globe.

Here’s why this matters: Right off the bat, MySpace Mail with a sexy new interface is a major player in the e-mail space based on sheer size alone. With nearly 130 million global users, it will enter the field as the 4th largest email provider in the world, and 2nd largest in the U.S. And it’s being built on top of the MySpace Messaging service that plenty of people are already using a lot — it accounts for some 20% of MySpace’s site traffic, we’re told.

Here’s what else is nice: Because MySpace has had so-called vanity URLs since its inception (unlike Facebook, which just rolled out the feature), you can use those as your email address with the new MySpace Mail. So for a page that resides at myspace.com/techcrunch, the email would be techcrunch@myspace.com, for example. And, if you don’t like the vanity URL you currently have, MySpace is giving you the opportunity to change it to something else (assuming it’s available). This would also change your vanity URL for your profile.

Google is finally figuring out that short links are just easier to deal with, especially on a mobile phone. No, it is not rolling out its own URL shortening service just yet (bit.ly, stand down). But today it is introducing what it calls “smart links” to the mobile version of Gmail.

When it recognizes a super-long link like one for Google Maps, it will shorten it to the underlying name thing being linked to. In this case, it is an address.

When it comes to email, less is more. So I applaud Gmail’s efforts to try to reduce all the unwanted emails in my inbox. Its latest attempt to make it easier to unsubscribe from unwanted email newsletters is well-intentioned, but falls flat on its face in its current form. When you report a newsletter as spam, you may now see the notification box above asking you if you want to automagically unsubscribe as well. You would click “Unsubscribe and report as spam” and Gmail will unsubscribe for you.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, that is because it is. First of all, it only works for messages which include a “List-Unsusbcribe” header in the email with an accompanying “mailto” URL. No self-respecting spammer would include those. But wait, it gets worse. The feature is purposely not activated for known spammers.