If you like to make calls from Gmail, then here’s some good news. The service will now support over 38 different languages, and Google has also lowered the call rates to more than 150 destinations.

The rates have been cut quite a bit. For example, you can make calls to a landline in France for $0.02/min, while it will only cost you $0.10/min to call a mobile phone in UK and chat up your British friends. Calls to the U.S. or Canada placed within those countries will continue to be free for the rest of 2011. Calls to the U.S. or Canada placed from outside these countries will be charged $0.01 per minute. That’s a bargain.

According to an official announcement from Google, the recent issues involving a number of Gmail users who lost all of their old emails has been resolved. They claimed it was fixed a few days after it came to light, but it hadn’t been completely fixed, as a number of Gmail users were still without access to their old emails.

Now however, Google’s latest statement says that all of these issues should be fixed, but if anybody still has problems with Gmail, they should contact Google. It’s a good lesson to learn about not completely relying on cloud computing. Offline backups of your email might be a good idea.

It might be a good idea to backup your gmail account. Now would be a good time. As many as 500,000 Gmail users lost access to their inboxes this morning and some of them are even reporting that years worth of messages, attachments and Google Chat logs have vanished when they were able to log back on. That’s pretty frightening stuff, to think that you could lose all of that info so easily.

Apparently the bug reset some accounts, treating their owners as new users, even displaying welcome messages. Google says that the issue “affects less than .29% of the Google Mail userbase,” and of course engineers are working to fix the issue.

Gmail users with Android phones have some good news today. Google has updated their Gmail app for the Android operating system. The update brings some new features and also fixes some bugs on the app.

Gingerbread devices will now be able to copy text with a long press, and all users will be able to sync custom label colors. While there isn’t anything earth shattering here, the ability to copy text with a long press is something that was very needed. Get thee to the Android Market to download it for yourself.

Gmail has just become even more useful. Google now allows voice calls to another phone using Gmail. Now, that is pretty useful. It will be free if you place calls to the US and Canada until January 2011. Phone calls to other countries will be billed at “very low rates”.

Talking with family and friends in the U.K., France, Germany, China, India, Mexico and other countries is as little as $0.02 per minute. Just dial a number like you normally do and click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list. Only US Gmail users will be able to use it over the next few days. You just have to install the voice and video plug-in.

GMail has got to be one of the most useful email services around and that’s because they are always working to improve your experience. Now Google has made another tiny, but extremely useful improvement to its Gmail service.

Those using Google Chrome will be able to drag attachments out of messages to save the attachment directly to your computer. Just click and drag the file that you want to your desktop, and it will be saved. They had previously introduced drag and drop as a method to attach files to Gmail.

Odd as it seems, the Department of Telecom in India could ban BlackBerry devices, Skype and even Gmail services if those services won’t comply with the government’s request to ensure that data going through their networks will be made available to security agencies in a readable format. Good luck with that.

The powers that be in that part of the world have also decided to amend the IT laws, making it compulsory for foreign companies, as those that do not require a local license, to provide all the data required by Indian law enforcement agencies.

The Google press conference we heard about on Tuesday, as expected, brought us a new social networking “widget” called Google Buzz. The new feature integrates into Google Gmail with almost no setup whatsoever and provides a way to share and keep up on information with friends or the general public.

By going to the Google Buzz website users can quickly add Buzz to there Gmail account where they can see a feed of posts from others and posts their own statuses, all integrated with the existing Gmail inbox. Users can choose to share these with just their closest friends through the application or to everyone. Google even gets users started by automatically having them follow the contacts they chat and email with currently through Gmail and Google Talk.

Google reportedly has a planned press conference on Tuesday to announce some new features to its online email service which will turn it into more of a social hub of communication between friends. The new “widget” that will be added to the free Gmail tool will allow users to keep up with their friends through a stream of quick updates, similar to sites like Facebook and Twitter.

This is not a surprising move for Google who is continuously trying to keep online users centered around Google’s tools, providing the company with more information as well as additional content and exposure to online ads.

Google could also potential integrate other online social media content into it’s stream from users, such as videos from YouTube or pictures from Picasa. It could even tie into external sources with open API’s such as …

This Gboard keyboard might not have all 69 Gmail shortcuts, but the 19 that it does feature are probably the most-used. Search, star, archives, trash, all the important ones are here and even in Google colors.

This isn’t an official Google device, but it is both Mac and Windows-friendly and can also be used for non-Gmail shortcuts. It will cost you only $19.99. Just plug into into your USB port, turn on Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts and make the most out of your mail time.

My Pre is reporting that a tipster with a webOS emulator has found that the Pre will use IMAP IDLE. This means that users on GMail will have near instantaneous reception of new emails. Because it’s getting pushed to the phone from the GMail servers.

Pre users are going to love that. At the moment, the only phone to support GMail push is the G1 (and soon the HTC Magic or any other Android device). Palm’s relationship with Google is proving to be extremely awesome for Pre users.

On the heels of RIM adding a push API, Google is enabling some BlackBerry users to get their Gmail and Google Calendar stuff on their handsets. Don’t jump for joy just yet. There are some shortcomings that limit its usefulness. Like the fact that users have to be connecting to BlackBerry Enterprise Server instances, and those instances have to be backed by Microsoft Exchange.

Also, only 250 users per Enterprise Server instance can get their mobile Gmail on, changes made to appointments on a handset cannot be pushed back to Google Calendar. Plus, searching for Gmail messages still requires a separate app. Updates and improvements are on the way, but until then this is what you get.

If your current email notifier isn’t doing a good enough job, you might want to check this one out. It will inform you when you’ve got new mail by lighting up in blue, red or green. You can assign each of the colors a different email client and you’re all set.

It even tells you the capacity of unread emails by audible alerts. And of course it’s shaped like your standard snail mail envelope. The software will work with Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook Express and any POP3 programs. Dream Cheeky does the email authentication for you, so you may want to be extra careful for your privacy.