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.

Mr. Carr’s assertions were certainly interesting. He started by pointing out how the innovation of information technology dates back well before the web, perhaps even before Gutenberg’s printing press to when the written word became just as valuable as the spoken. But a book, he argues, requires (allows for?) a single stream of consciousness, providing our long term memory the opportunity to absorb knowledge as the short term consumes it.

The Internet (and as an audience member rightly pointed out, Mr. Carr refers to much of today’s current technological advancements as “The Internet” – so much of what we do is connected, it’s excusable), on the other hand, allows for (requires?) so much going on at once: to the point that in just a few short years blogging has gone from long form prose to 140 characters. In turn, our long and short term memory struggles, our attention spans suffer, our ability to multitask deteriorates.

Irony: all of those books behind Mr. Carr made it extremely difficult to focus.

Questions from the rather large group of people who came to hear Mr. Carr speak were broad. There were those who wanted to know if this was an individual problem or could be solved by institutions (he figures both), those who wanted to know if the benefits of collaboration via connectivity outweighed the negatives (he’s not so sure that’s the case), and those who were curious how long it would take for the anti-Net counter culture to become prevalent (could take some time, probably won’t be significant enough to effect immediate change).

I, being the practical applications and commercial implications type, asked if the iPad – with its emphasis on reading books, browsing magazines, and watching movies – could be a glimmer of hope on the horizon: technology saving us from its own perils. Alas, no. And he’s right: devices such as the iPad and Kindle (and yes, I realize they are not the same device) have only inspired publishers to make their books more “connected,” distracting readers along the way.

Deep. Sigh.

So is this really legit? Are we destined to a life without the capacity for knowledge or memory to which our parents’ generation was privy? Do those of you who, like me, think you’re an excellent multitasker actually struggle to juggle all that’s going on?

As someone who just returned from two weeks [mostly] off the grid, I will say this: it’s refreshing. But by now you’ve gotten bored with this blog post (if you’ve made it this far). And I have about 20 new emails to read.