The competition between Google and Apple appears to be getting fiercer by the day. Google has now acquired popular iPhone app reMail, and has discontinued it in Apple’s App Store, and most likely offer it in the Android Market (although this has not been confirmed).

It’s been a pretty big week for Facebook. Not only is there a lot of talk about Facebook’s potential for becoming the top news source on the web, but the company celebrated its sixth birthday, is passing the 400 million user mark, and began rolling out some new design changes. In addition, the company is said to be rewriting its messaging feature and preparing to launch a webmail product, but first things first.

Last year, Google released a Gmail Labs feature that added a search box for regular Google Search within Gmail. The lab is simply called Google search. However, it didn’t provide all of the features that the real Google search does. They have now taken steps to improve the feature’s capabilities in the following areas:

Back in the summer MySpace launched its own email service called MySpace Mail. The company has now announced that it has surpassed 15 million accounts for that service.

"Adoption by our users has experienced phenomenal growth, well exceeding initial expectations," says MySpace’s Rajit Marwah. "At launch we set a goal of 10 million accounts created within a year – we knew we were on to something when we surpassed this goal in less than a quarter."

Google has made some changes to the way ads shown to Gmail users are selected. If you use the service, you have probably noticed that Google often shows ads that are somehow related to the content of whatever piece of email you are currently reading. If you have noticed this, you have probably also noticed that sometimes the ads don’t seem to have anything to do with your conversation whatsoever.

Today Facebook announced that it is giving users the option to receive updates from Facebook applications in their email. This would work similar to how email notifications do, but don’t worry, you have to opt in for developers to be able to email you. According to Facebook, they will not be able to access your email address without your consent.

As news of Google’s China situation dominates headlines, the company has also announced that it is turning on https access for Gmail as the default (Gmail accounts were hacked in China, in case you haven’t read about that yet).

Https, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure is used to provide encryption and secure ID. Back in 2008 Google started giving users the option to use it.

Google released a stunning blog post that details a "sophisticated and targeted attack" on Gmail that "resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google".

Google notes that the attack was not just on Google infrastructure but also on more than twenty other companies from various industries. Google states that they are working with the authorities in the U.S. and will be notifying the companies of the breaches.

Update: VerticalResponse CEO Janine Popick has written a separate piece adding 10 more reasons.

Google has added a feature to Gmail, which allows users to merge all of their duplicate contacts into one. Until now, users have had to go through contacts one-by-one in order to clean up their list.

"Managing a big address book can be a challenge, so it’s no surprise that the top request for Google contacts is a fast, easy way to merge duplicate contacts," says software engineer for Gmail, Dominik Marcinski.

Facebook (96%) is now the most popular communication tool, followed by SMS (93%) and email (91%), according to a new survey from Prompt Communications.

When consumers were asked which method they used most frequently to communicate, 37 percent said SMS followed by Facebook and the phone at 28 percent. Respondents feel that email is now less important than social media, but only 20 percent said they could live without it entirely.

Gmail’s offline feature has graduated from Gmail Labs, and is now a full-blown feature of Google’s email service. The feature emerged as a lab experiment nearly a year ago, but it has now been deemed ready for primetime.

Google has introduced a new Gmail Labs feature, which gives Gmail users control over the default style of their text. In other words, you can set how you like your text to appear normally, and it will automatically appear that way.

Google has introduced a feature that lets you send attachments in Gmail while you’re offline. It works the same way as it would online, except that you can’t include inline images.

What is it with airlines?

If they’re not breaking guitars, their pilots are missing airports, or they’re berating people that are trying to help them.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has released a list of "best practices" for marketers and publishers who want to monetize their email efforts. The best practices come in a document appropriately titled "Email Monetization Strategies."

With all of the spam out there and the increasing amount of malice that comes with it, it’s easy to look at the situation and think that email must be dying. Combine the overwhelming amounts of inbox spam and the ever-increasing popularity of communication tools like Twitter and Facebook, and you may ask yourself why you even need email.