I realize passwords can be stolen. Maybe I’m a sucker and was phished. Maybe one of the various public Wi-Fi networks I’ve been on in the past few months of traveling was compromised. It doesn’t matter. I should be changing my password more often.

But it also got me thinking. How was it so easy for these guys to send out a few hundred emails from my Gmail account? If Gmail is so good at filtering incoming spam (and it definitely is), how are its outgoing spam filters so poor? There are things Gmail could do to help this problem.

For instance:

The “Wait, What Are You Doing?” Filter

By my count, 47 emails were sent from my account between 3:14am and 3:17am, each without a subject line, each containing just a link, each to alphabetically sequential addresses from my address book. Maybe Gmail should raise a red flag at some point? Maybe after the first five are sent? How about a “hey, we love you and all, but maybe you can send the next five after a few hours” alert? I woke up at 6:19am to an email from a friend alerting me to the spamming. I could have shut it down at that point.

The “You’ve Let Go Of Your Ex-Girlfriend…I Guess We Can, Too” Feature

Gmail is to email addresses as cell phones are to phone numbers: no one has to remember them any more. Just type in a couple of letters from an address, hit tab, and move on. That’s awesome. What’s not awesome is that clients, co-workers, and random people I happened to email five years ago got a link from me this morning asking them to buy Viagra. To top it off, each note had my signature, so they were reminded which idiot from their past lives was being hacked. So I’m asking Gmail to be dumber: after six months or a year, if I haven’t emailed my junior year accounting professor, do me a favor and forget his email address. If I need it that badly, I can do a search for his name within my mail.

The “We Know You Hate Taking Your Medicine, But It’s That Time Again” Lab

The previous two features I mentioned could not be part of Gmail Labs; it would be too easy for outgoing spammers to turn them off. But what if Gmail had an optional feature that reminded you to change your password everythree months? Too few people would use it. And it’s something we can remember to do on our own (I just added it as a recurring event on my calendar). But if “Go Back To Gmail Beta” is a Lab feature…surely we can add this one, too.

Maybe these are tougher features to implement than they seem. The product managers and developers at Google who work on Gmail are significantly smarter than I. But I woke up this morning and found that a few hundred of my closest random acquaintances got an email from me with a link to buy pills online. And that’s frustrating. My wife pointed out that most online users understand that spam happens. But each one of those emails had my website in them (which is how I know the hackers were using the Gmail web interface), and who knows what the readers of those emails will now think about me and my work.

Here’s to hoping Gmail’s outgoing spam catches become just as smart as the incoming.

Have you been hacked? Got any tips or tricks to keep it from happening? Any more outgoing spam features you’d like to see in Gmail? Hit those comments.

I could also pretend I have an audience.

In fact, over the past six months of near blog dormancy, I have had quite the audience – at least if the comment moderation queue is any indication. These dear readers have been very helpful. Many offer free drugs. Some provide sex advice. But perhaps the most valuable comments come in the form of a free joke (followed, of course, by a link to ch3ap v1agr@!!!11).

Over the next few weeks, as holiday schedules hopefully provide a slow down to day job related chaos, I’ll be posting some work and other notes. I’ll cover Digital Out-of-home, Arduino, some photography work, and some other topics. I may even add a captcha to my comments form.

For now, however, here is as complete a list I can compile of the jokes left in my comments over the past few months…after the break.

Why can’t a woman ask her brother for help? Because he can’t be a brother and assist her too.

What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire? Frostbite.

Why do Vampire have to brush their teeth? Because they have Bat-Breath.

When should you use milk to irrigate your fields? When you are growing creamed corn.

What kind of flowers grow in outer space? Sunflowers.

What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t work? A stick.

What do you call a crazy baker? A dough nut.

What do ghouls wear on their feet in the rain?!? GHOULOSHES!!!

What kind of lettuce was served on the Titanic? Iceberg.

Why are there so many Johnsons in the phone book? They all have phones.

Why did the bunnies go on strike? They wanted a raise in celery.

What’s a chimney sweep’s most common ailment? The flue.

What do you get when you cross a squirrel with a kangaroo? An animal that keeps its nuts in its pockets.

Where does all the pepper go? No one nose.

Why did the cannibal rush over to the cafeteria? He heard children were half price.

What is a cannibal’s favorite type of TV show? A celebrity roast.

How do they put out fires at the post office? They stamp them out.

How many Microsoft employees does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None. We’ll just declare darkness the new standard.

What do you call it when instead of raining cats and dogs, it rains chickens, ducks and turkeys? Fowl Weather!

What kind of necktie does a pig wear? A pigsty.

Why is an evil witch like a candle? They are both WICKED

What kind of bird can write? A penguin.

Did you hear about the man who was tap dancing? He broke his ankle when he fell into the sink.

What do you call bedtime stories for boats? Ferry tales.

What did the painter say to the wall? One more crack and I’ll plaster you!

What do you call a bunch of dancing pebbles? The Rockettes.

What do you call a knife that cuts 4 loaves of bread at a time? A four-loaf cleaver.