“Got the Wrong Bob?” is a new Google Labs feature that you can turn on in Gmail. It works by analysing groups of people that you usually email together. For example, if you accidentally include your boss Hank in with your normal key party invite group when you meant to invite country singer Hank Williams Jr, well, Gmail will ask if you meant this Hank instead of that Hank. This will in turn save you a boatload of awkwardness (or a magical night where you learn more about your boss than you ever thought possible, but that’s neither here nor there).

So go ahead, check it out and see if it works. It certainly can’t hurt, right? [Official Gmail Blog via Esquire]

The New York Times says Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have confirmed the addresses are real, and that they’re helping affected users recover their accounts.

Even though you generally have to be pretty damn gullible to fall for one of these fake sites (or open strange-looking email attachments), now might be a good time to change your webmail password…something you should be doing every now and then anyway. [BBC via New York Times]

It all happened thanks to the Wyoming-based Rocky Mountain Bank and Judge James Ware—a US District Court Judge for the Northern District of California who, according to Wikipedia, fabricated “the story of being the brother of Virgil Ware, a 13 year old black boy shot by teenage racists in Alabama in 1963 on the same day as the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing”. So nice!

This is the story: A Rocky Mountain Bank employee sent a confidential document containing the names, addresses, tax identification numbers and loan information of 1325 people and businesses. Instead of sending it to the right person, the employee used another email address by mistake, only to realise his mess a little bit later. They tried to contact the person at the wrong address, but that person didn’t reply.

As a result, and probably panicking they were going to be sued themselves if their imbroglio was uncovered, they decided to sue Google, asking them to release the identity of the person who owned the Gmail account. At the same time, they filed a motion asking the court to keep the lawsuit secret. Fortunately, Judge Ronald M. Whyte—who at the time was acting on behalf of Judge Ware—denied the secrecy of the case.

Then came the real Judge Ware and his shiny big fat gavel, to screw up everything a little more: When Google said that the idiotic bank’s fuzzuckup was not their problem, and refused to provide the identity of the user, the judge ordered Google to shut down the Gmail account.

Why? Who the hell knows. It makes as much sense to me as it does to you.

Most probably the account’s owner doesn’t use that account anymore. But that’s beyond the point. Why does anyone have to pay for the mistake of others? Why would I have to see my mail account closed because some moron sends me the wrong mail? Yes, it seems like the mostest stupidest thing of the week. And it’s only Tuesday. [Techdirt and Information Week via BBG]

Previously you could just sync your Google contacts and calendars, but now finally it supports Gmail as well, allowing you to be notified instantly when you get a new email. Push Gmail via Google Sync works on the iPhone as well as in Windows Mobile and Symbian. [Google Mobile Blog via TechCrunch]

Well, push describes a lot of things. Push is simply an action. Versus, say, pulling. Maybe that’s horribly abstract, so try this: If information shows up on your phone or neural implant or messaging program without you (or your wares) asking for it—that’s push. The info is pushed to you, versus you pulling it from the source. There are tons of ways push can be (and is) used.

Email’s a pretty good starting point for grasping the difference between push and the other stuff. You probably know good ol’ POP3—you log into your mail server and pull down new messages. Maybe it’s on a frequent schedule, so it feels automatic, even instant, but you’re still reaching out to the mail server every time to check and see if there’s new mail to download.

IMAP is a little fancier than POP, where all of your folders and email are the same on all of your computers, phones and other gadgets, and any change you make on one shows up on the other, since it’s all happening on a remote server somewhere. But with the standard setup, it’s still the same deal—your mail program has to log in, see what’s new, and pull it down. IMAP does have a pretty neat trick though, an optional feature called IMAP IDLE, that does push pretty well—it’s what the Palm Pre uses for Gmail, for instance. Essentially, with IMAP IDLE, the mail server can tell whatever mail app that you’ve got new messages waiting, without you (or your app) hammering the refresh button over and over. When the app knows there’s new messages, it connects and pulls them down, so it gives you just about the speed of push, without matching the precise mechanism.

While different systems do things differently (obvs), what true push services have in common is that they generally insert a middleman between you and the information source.

RIM’s setup for the BlackBerry is probably the most sophisticated. When your BlackBerry registers with the carrier (which has to support BlackBerry), the details are handed to RIM’s network operating centre, so the NOC knows where to send your mail. The NOC watches your mail server, keeps tabs on the phone’s location, and pushes email through to your phone whenever you get new stuff.

What makes it push is that your phone’s not actually polling a server for new messages to pull—it only receives them when they hit your inbox, and are then pushed to your phone by RIM’s servers. This means you save a lot of battery life that’d be wasted by making the phone constantly hit the servers for updates. The flipside is that when RIM’s servers blow up, you don’t get email, since it’s all routed through their system—hence the other panic that grips dudes in suits once every few months lately.

The other biggie is Microsoft, who has Direct Push, part of Exchange’s ActiveSync. It’s architected a little bit differently, so it doesn’t need the precise kind of data about where your phone is that RIM’s NOCs do: The phone or whatever you’ve got sends an HTTPS with a long lifespan to the Exchange server—if new mail arrives before it dies, the Exchange tells your device there’s new stuff, so it should start a sync. After it syncs, the device sends out another long HTTPS request, starting it all over again.

Apple’s weak-sauce substitute for multitasking works pretty similarly: The developer has something its wants to send an iPhone, when its application isn’t actually running, like an IM. It sends the notification to Apple’s push servers, which send the notification to the phone through a “persistent IP connection” the phone maintains with the servers. This connection, which is only maintained when push notifications are turned on, is needed to locate the phone, but still doesn’t draw as much power as constantly pinging the mail server.

Of course, those aren’t the only push systems around, and it’s only getting more and more important as stuff gets shifted to the cloud. We haven’t mentioned Android and Google Chrome, but both utilise push (or will) in different ways. Suffice it to say, Google Sync will soon be a major player in this game. But basically, all kinds of different data can be pushed—calendars, browser data, hell, even IM is a kind of push—and they all work more or less the same broad way.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about pushing, shoving and pancake massacres to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a messy bloodbath.

They say magic doesn’t exist, but apparently it does. Head to Lifehacker to read all about the trick, plus other considerations about message length. And if you are curious about other words that trigger this mechanism, read McKay’s study. [Lifehacker and John McKay]

It’s dead simple—you enter your Gmail account information and that’s it. On the backend, it’s actually using Gmail’s standard IMAP idle function (but on the developer Tiverias’ servers), so there’s a slight delay between the mail hitting your inbox and the notification getting pushed from them to your phone. But the 10-30 seconds lag MG Seigler reports is totally acceptable, especially since you get a pop-up preview of the email.

Two things: Seigler doesn’t make it clear if it supports more than one Gmail account, and all those pop-ups could get annoying, if you get a ton of email, anyway.

Oh, and it’s possible Apple won’t let it into the App Store. They say none of their code violates Apple or Google’s ToS, but as Seigler points out, we all know how “reasonable” the App Store review process is. But even if it is blocked, all hope isn’t lost—you can pull a similar workaround using the $2.99 Prowl app, which pushes Growl notifications from your Mac (and soon, Windows PC) to your phone, so you can be pinged whenever you have new messages that way.

I have to say, I’m loving seeing push notifications used for more excellent purposes than just IM apps. [TechCrunch]