This Friday Gmail Labs will be celebrating its one year anniversary. That’s right… those “extras” that you’ve been enjoying in Gmail all started one year ago when they pulled the curtain off of 13 features that testers could enable in their Gmail accounts. At the time none of the ones available were anything to die for, but as time has progressed the things they’ve added have really changed the way I use Gmail. In fact one year ago I was using a desktop mail client, and as more Labs features were released it slowly converted me over to using the web-based mail client.
I counted up the number of Gmail Labs features available, and if my math skills are anything to go by it looks like there are 51 at the moment. That’s almost an average of one per week if you spread that number out over the course of a year. Of the 51 available I have 26 of them enabled.
I’ve been keeping a close eye on the new Gmail Labs features that Google has been releasing, and if I think they’ll be helpful to me I’ll go ahead and enable them. What’s impressive is that even though I have over half of them enabled I don’t see it affect the performance of the site.
I was going to list out all of the ones that I use, but after some careful thought I figured it would be better to only share my favorites:
- Inbox Preview – Show a simple, static preview of the inbox while loading.
- Multiple Inboxes – Add extra lists of emails in your inbox to see even more important email at once. The new lists of threads can be labels, your starred messages, drafts or any search you want.
- Undo Send – Thankfully I haven’t had to use this yet, but I know the day will come! With it you can stop messages from being sent for a few seconds after hitting the send button.
- Tasks – Lets me manage my to-do list from my Inbox.
- Send and Archive – Adds a button to the compose form that lets you send a reply message and archive the email conversation in a single action.
- Title Tweaks – Changes the order of the elements in the browser’s title bar… makes it easier to see how many new emails there are.
Those are the six Labs features that have really changed the way I use Gmail… particularly the Multiple Inboxes one. I love being able to see certain emails that I’ve tagged or starred right there in my Inbox. It gives me even less of a reason to leave an email sitting there not filed.
So here’s a big thanks to Google and even more specifically the Gmail team! Now they just need to come up with a more user-friendly way to manage which Gmail Labs features are enabled/disabled. Because now that there are over 50 items it can be rather tedious to scroll through the list to find one in particular.
I have the following plugins enabled:
- Super Stars
- Sender timezone
- Old snakey
- Drag ‘n drop items
- Customized label colors
- Auto-complete for search
- Insert images
- Add gadgets (in conjunction with Remember The Milk)
And my all-time favorite: undo send. A false sense of security won’t hurt ya.
check out Suggest more recipients
it works great, it suggests people according to your To recipients (maybe it will learn CC and BCC too), and to avoid sending emails by mistakes, you can’t choose the people by pressing the Tab key. you have to click their names with a mouse.
It is now possible to set up a preferred format for your gmail using the new “Canned Responses” feature.
After enabling the Canned Responses option, you only need to go to a blank e-mail, type in a few characters and format them as you would like (colour, font etc). Then delete most of the characters (I leave the word ‘Hi’ in my favourite format) and save the e-mail as a Canned Response.
From then on you can access your preferred format by clicking on the Canned Responses option within gmail and then type away using your saved settings.
I’ve waited for the chance to set up a regular format for my gmail for as long as I have been using it, and now it’s finally here nobody seems to have noticed the possibility!
Thats with no doubts the gmail advantage over, for instance, Hotmail and others. Gmail is being constantly improved. Others stay stopped in time.
I can’t believe Hotmail still hasn’t got grouped conversations. It’s impossible to explain what they’re missing out on if they’ve never used Gmail before. But it can save you so much time when you’re going through a bunch of RE:’s.
Believe it or not I actually used this the other day. I hit send, and then realized that I had only entered in one of the two recipients that I wanted. I was able to catch it before Gmail fired it off.
Very true, but there are also times where I want to ungroup some emails to read them. So I wish Gmail had an option to add/remove emails from a group.
You can turn *all* tabbed conversations off, but it’s all or nothing.
I like having the conversations, it’s just that sometimes an email thread goes off into a totally unrelated direction. It would make more sense to be able to break a thread into a new group so that they are better organized.