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Yesterday's phishing attack in which several thousand Hotmail username and password combinations were leaked to the web now appears to be just the beginning of a massive phishing attack affecting users of multiple webmail services including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast, and Earthlink. The original list was posted anonymously on pastebin.com, a site generally used by developers sharing code snippets. Again, that site recently saw the addition 20,000 more login details from other webmail service providers, indicating what may the largest scale phishing attack to date.

Gmail user Dan McGee writes that he's found a new feature in his Gmail that places small favicons next to certain email messages in the inbox view. The icons have appeared next to emails sent from commercial services like Netflix and make those messages stand out when users quickly scan a crowded inbox.

This new feature is not just a simple productivity enhancement or advertisement. The icons are there to indicate which messages include "enhanced content" - real-time updates within the body of the email messages, from companies sending the emails.

Google just announced that its users can now get their Gmail messages pushed directly to their iPhones and Windows Mobile phones. Push Gmail is now a feature of Google Sync. Google started to support the iPhone, iPod touch, and Windows Mobile in Google Sync earlier this year, but at that time, it could only push calendar and address book changes directly to these phones. Finally, Gmail users will now be able to see messages in the iPhone's mail app without having to regularly ping Google's servers for updates.

Today I spotted a contextual advert within an email thread in Gmail. Usually these 'sponsored links' are displayed in a separate pane on the right-hand side of Gmail - i.e. outside of the actual email content. But this places the ad squarely within the content of the email thread. It's possible this has been around for a while, but if so I only just noticed it. I took a couple of screenshots - let us know in the comments whether you've seen this before.

Updated at 4:45 PM PST with a response from Google.

Google has reportedly sent a letter to a high-profile Caribbean investigative website called The TCI Journal saying it will supply the IP addresses used to access the Journal's primary GMail account unless the Journal supplies a legal counter-motion within the next two weeks. A libel suit filed against the Journal in Santa Clara, California Superior Court concerns its reporting of government corruption in the Turks & Caicos Islands.

This case is just the latest to be followed closely, reported on and even participated in by the controversial public interest document-exposure organization Wikileaks, a website where a staff of journalists and lawyers vet sensitive documents submitted by anonymous independent sources. The status of the case was summarized tonight by Julian Assange, Investigations Editor at Wikileaks.

Syncing with BlackBerry Enterprise server has long been one of the most requested features among Google Apps customers. Especially within the BlackBerry-dominated enterprise space, the fact that there was no way to easily integrate the two platforms was a huge disadvantage.

But starting today customers can get their hands on a Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise. This means that for the first time, users can get good synchronization of core applications like Gmail and Google Calendar for the first time.

After a bit of a delay, the GPush app (iTunes link) has finally arrived in the App Store. GPush will send you a push notification whenever a new email arrives in your inbox. The app, which costs $0.99, does one thing and one thing only: it checks your Gmail account for new messages and sends out push notifications whenever it detects new messages. Just enter your credentials and forget that you ever installed the app.

When Google Apps left beta back in July, Google announced that it would be adding a set of enterprise-specific features to make Premier Edition more attractive to businesses. Today Google has made good on that promise by supporting email retention and delegation for Apps customers.

Gmail is an awesome Web mail program, but it was missing some functionality essential for adoption in larger enterprises. One of those aspects was the ability for businesses to set company-wide retention policies in order to comply with regulatory requirements. Another one, the icing on the cake really, was email delegation that allows users to let others manage email for them.

Google just launched "Going Google" - a marketing campaign similar to the Spread Firefox to encourage companies to switch to Google Apps in the workplace. While millions already use Gmail, the campaign is aimed at luring business and enterprise users away from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. Google already claims to serve more than 1.75 million companies and judging by the flashy campaign, it hopes to increase that number in the near future.

After two years in the wild as a comprehensive suite, Google Apps has left beta. While having these hugely popular Web apps out of beta will undoubtedly have a positive effect on their use by consumers, it's the enterprise adoption that pushed Google to make the move.

For a long time now, the beta version of Apps has been far more stable than most software marked as such, though it's not been without hiccups. More importantly, seeing that beta label could still make big enterprise customers queasy, and if Google ever wanted to get serious about selling the Premier Edition, they needed to move Apps out of beta. That day has come.