Juzer Burhani

Zemanta is a plugin for Firefox and Internet explorer that integrates with Gmail and Yahoo mail and other Blogging Services to add inline images. for example this image down here is added through zemanta.
In blogger it also suggests tags.. cool huh.

It seems that this year Google's most popular web applications will work offline. After Google Reader and Google Docs, two other services will integrate with Gears. Andrew Fogg saw a preview of the integration at Google's offices and found that Gmail and Google Calendar will add offline support in approximately 6 weeks.



In the past months, Google accidentally enabled the option in Google Calendar and some users saw the dialog illustrated below: "To view and edit the next 3 months of your Google Calendar when you're not connected to the Internet, click OK."

Andrew also found out that Google will add SyncML support for Gmail contacts next month. He thinks this is "related to the sync that they worked on with Apple for 3G iPhone". SyncML is a standard for data synchronization supported by a lot of companies. "SyncML is most commonly thought of as a method to synchronize contact and calendar information between some type of handheld device and a computer (personal, or network-based service), such as between a mobile phone and a personal computer."

Google has finally realized that it's a bad idea to automatically add to the list of Gmail contacts all the people you've sent an email. An updated version of Gmail's contact manager has a separate section for the people you've emailed: "suggested contacts".



"My Contacts is a place to import, store and view all of the contact information that's important to you. You can also create your own groups of contacts to easily email many people at once. We add people you've emailed to Suggested Contacts. You can move contacts from Suggested Contacts into My Contacts at any time."



There's an option to automatically move suggested contacts into My Contacts if you frequently email them, but the previous behavior doesn't seem to be an option.





I don't have this new version of the contact manager, so if you notice other changes, post them in the comments.

One of the 13 features added to Gmail Labs in May is Superstars, an extension of Gmail's starring system. Instead of using a single star to flag all the messages, you can choose between 12 icons.





After enabling Superstars in Gmail Labs and clicking on "Save changes", go to the settings and select the icons you want to use. The exclamation mark is useful to flag important messages, quotes could show that a message needs a reply, while the info icon could be used for messages that contain valuable information.





To star messages faster, enable keyboard shortcuts in the settings. "The superstars will rotate when you press the 's' keyboard shortcut or when you click successively," explains Google. "Rotating through the superstars only works when you click (or hit 's') successively. If you pause for a second, then the next click will turn off the superstar. It's designed this way so that if you never click successively, then you'll just get the original on/off toggle behavior."



If you want to find the messages that have a certain kind of star, use one of the following queries:

has:yellow-star (or l:^ss_sy)

has:blue-star (or l:^ss_sb)

has:red-star (or l:^ss_sr)

has:orange-star (or l:^ss_so)

has:green-star (or l:^ss_sg)

has:purple-star (or l:^ss_sp)

has:red-bang (or l:^ss_cr)

has:yellow-bang (or l:^ss_cy)

has:blue-info (or l:^ss_cb)

has:orange-guillemet (or l:^ss_co)

has:green-check (or l:^ss_cg)

has:purple-question (or l:^ss_cp)



You can enable the Quick Links labs feature to save some of these queries so that they are always accessible with a single click. Just search for has:blue-star or any other value and click on "Add Quick Link".

Firefox with Greasemonkey only: The Google Contacts Autocomplete user script adds a drop-down of your Gmail contacts on any web-based email form where you'd enter an address. You must be signed into your Gmail account for the script to work; once it's installed, just start typing into an email text field to get search-as-you-type results from your Gmail address book. The first day or so it was installed, the script did nothing for me—then it magically started working (see screenshot)—so your mileage may vary. When it is working, this is a nifty way to access your contacts quickly and easily. The Google Contacts Autocomplete user script is a free download and requires Firefox with Greasemonkey. Thanks, Matt!

Google Contacts Autocomplete

 

Your email account can contain a lot of personal information, from bank alerts to love letters. Email that, I'm sure, you don't always want other people to see. We understand how important your Gmail accounts are to you, so we're adding a new layer of information and control. With this new feature, you can now track your recent sessions and you can also sign yourself out remotely.



If you are anything like me, you probably sign in to Gmail from multiple computers. I, for example, occasionally sign into my Gmail account from a friend's house when I need to check an important email. Usually I remember to sign out, but every once in a while I wonder if I really did. Now I no longer have to wonder.



At the bottom of your inbox, you'll see information about the time of the last activity on your account and whether it's still open in another location:







Using the above example, a quick glance at the footer while I'm at work shows that my account is indeed open in one other location. But I recognize the IP address - it's my computer at home. Turns out I left my Gmail account open when I left home in a hurry this morning.



Your IP address, or Internet Protocol address, is a number associated with your computer when you connect to the Internet. Some of you might want to know your IP address numbers (more info on finding out your IP address below) for an extra layer of control. For others who don't want to think about IP information, you don't need to.



Continuing with the above example, I can see more details about my recent activity by clicking on the Details link:







The top table, under "Concurrent session information," indicates all open sessions, along with IP address and "access type" -- which refers to how email was retrieved, for example, through iGoogle, POP3 or a mobile phone. The bottom table, under "Recent activity," contains my most recent history along with times of access. I can also view my current IP address at the very bottom of this window, where it says "This computer is using IP address..."



With this information, I can quickly verify that all the Gmail activity was indeed mine. I remember using Gmail at the times and locations listed. Being extra cautious, I can also click on the "Sign out all other sessions" button to sign out of the account I left open at home.



Note: We are in the process of rolling this feature out to the latest version of Gmail, which is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.

"Spent the long weekend posting a rash of "Better" extension updates that add features, fix bugs, and offer full Firefox 3 compatibility. If you haven't already, download your favorite "Better" Firefox extensions now:

• Better Gmail 2
  Version 0.5.2: Updates and fixes the Redesigned skin; Adds Hide Gmail chat script.
• Better Flickr
  Version 0.3: Adds Firefox 3 support, Rich Edit, Photo Page Enhancer, and Thumbnail Page Enhancer.
• Better GCal
  Version 0.3: Adds the Redesigned skin beta by Globex Designs.
• Better GReader
  Version 0.3: Adds Colorful List View; Updates the Minimalistic skin; Adds international domain support including google.co.uk, google.es, google.de, and others.
• Better Lifehacker
  Version 0.2: Adds HTML Helper and Nested comment replies.
• Better YouTube
  Version 0.4.3: Adds Firefox 3 compatibility; Fixes FlowPlayer (alternate, non-autoplaying player) and YouTube Theater view.

I have submitted all of these latest versions to Mozilla Add-ons, but most have not yet been approved, so to get the latest version you must get the download it the extension's homepage here on Lifehacker. You can use Firefox's "Find Updates" button too, but if you downloaded the extension from Mozilla Add-ons in the past, Firefox will not automatically find the update today if it has not been approved there yet. You must download it using the links above. As always, post your "Better" extension suggestions in the comments."

Gmail Blog turns 1 - Happy Birthday Gmail Blog.
For the celebrations they have posted their Top 10 Gmail Tips for you. Catch these tip here if you have missed any. Here they are:

"When we launched the Gmail blog exactly one year ago, our goal was to provide you with new feature announcements, insight into how the Gmail team works, and tips on how to become a Gmail ninja. We hope you've enjoyed reading our posts, and to celebrate our birthday, here's a look back at the past year and a recap of our 10 most read tips:

10) Have Gmail do your laundry - How to suggest new features for Gmail. We always like hearing from you.

9) Tips for importing old email to Gmail - A post on how to make the switch to Gmail as seamless as possible.

8) Edit contacts right from your chat list - When we released the newest version of Gmail, it came with some new bells and whistles. This one will help you clean up your chat list and change contact information quickly.

7) 2 Hidden ways to get more from your Gmail address - You can insert certain characters to your email address to get additional names out of it -- all of which still make it to your inbox.

6) How to find any email with Gmail search - To take the best advantage of Gmail search, we explain how to use search operators so you can find any email the first time.

5) 5 little-known Gmail features you may not yet know about - When we released the newest version of Gmail, there were a bunch of really useful features people didn't yet know about. So we told you about them.

4) Top 10 little known Gmail features (and Part 2) - In this post, we explained ten Gmail features that people generally didn't know about. From "custom from" to creating events in Gmail, this post goes over key features any serious Gmail user needs to know.

3) Getting Gmail anywhere: IMAP versus POP - A lot of people choose to get Gmail on mobile phones and destkop mail clients, so we went over the two most popular ways people do so and showed the key benefits of using IMAP -- which we've provided for free since the fall.

2) 3 Gmail Labs features that will spice up your inbox - This post covers how to enable and use the most popular Gmail Labs features: Superstars, Pictures in chat and Quick Links.

1) 9 reasons to archive - From the sophisticated to the snarky, these tips fueled the most viewed post in Gmail blog history. If this doesn't get you to archive, then we don't know what will.

Another one for Gmail crazy people ...
Lifehacker has updated its Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension .. grab it here.
Download version 0.5.1 here.

"For those of you using newly released Firefox 3, or willing to give it a try, you can take advantage of a new feature that lets you set Gmail as the default for all email links -- those that contain "mailto:" in them. If you're like me and don't have a default email client set up, then clicking these links typically launches an installation wizard for a destkop mail client, or opens some email software that you don't actually use.



Now you can configure Firefox to launch Gmail when you click on email address links and avoid the hassle. The folks over at Lifehacker published these tips on how to set it up:



1) Go to Gmail and sign in.



2) While in Gmail, copy and paste the following into your browser's address bar and hit enter.



javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Gmail")



Google Apps users can use this code (but be sure to replace yourdomain.com with your Google Apps domain name):



javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Gmail")



3) Click "Add Application" when you are prompted¹. Congrats, you just added Gmail to your browser's list of mail clients.







4) To set Gmail as your default, click on this link and you will be prompted with a dialog box listing available email applications. By selecting Gmail and checking "Remember my choice for mailto links" you won't have to tell your browser again. (You don't actually need to send an email after you click that link.)







You can always change this setting by going into "Tools" > "Options" (or "Firefox" > "Preferences," for Mac users) selecting "Applications" and going to the "mailto" option. There's a drop down next to the option that lets you change your default. Clicking "Application details" will take you to a settings page where you can completely remove Gmail or other mail apps.







¹If nothing happens when you type in the code, double check that you copied the entire snippet correctly, and if nothing happens, you probably changed an advanced setting (maybe without even knowing) and need to set it back to default. To do it, type about:config into your browser and make sure that network.protocol-handler.external.mailto is on the default setting: true."

Last time we redirected all of our email accounts to the one place, our central email hub at Gmail. Once you have all your accounts trickling into Gmail, you’ve got to manage that flow of information so that a) it’s possible to get through all of your email in fifteen minutes or less and b) it’s easy to find next week, next month and next year.

The Inbox is Sacred

You must learn to see your inbox as an almost sacred place: the worst sin you can commit against it is leaving messages in there to rot. I’m not talking about days or weeks. You’ve got to deal with each message in your inbox during your email processing session. It cannot be in the inbox once you’ve finished.
Since we’re using multiple email accounts, we have them filtering into a variety of labels. If we don’t, the boundaries between the roles and information associated with each account becomes blurred and quite often, just plain confusing. The inbox is a very useful tool for processing and this separation is an unfortunate necessity.
In the last post we talked about using the All Mail feature to replace this, but the problem with this approach is that you can’t “process out” the incoming information this way. There are a couple of alternative solutions we’ll address in a moment, but the simplest way at this point is to deal with all mail as though it were in your inbox - it’s an attitude hack, rather than a technological one.

Dealing with Messages in Your Inbox

The first step to processing your email is, obviously, to read it. Unfortunately, this is where many people stop (and it’s frustrating when you’re trying to get solid communication going).
Read smart, not hard. Give the subject and first paragraph of the email a scan to determine its relevancy, because there will always be emails that are pointless and you don’t need to read them. If it’s totally useless to you, you can delete the message. “Never delete an email again” is not a mantra I totally believe in.
If you’ve kept the message, you can read it properly. By the way, I should mention that if more than 15% of your inbox processing consists of deleting messages, you’re probably not creating enough pre-qualifiers and smart “obstacles” to people who want your email address. The + hack works well here, which we’ll get to soon.
Once you’ve finished reading the message, you must process it. There are a few outcomes:

• Reply and archive,
• Reply and delete,
• Reply, turn it into an action, archive
• Turn it into an action, archive
• Archive
• Delete

If you’re turning the email into an action you’ll almost always want to archive it, not delete it, for future reference. For messages that you need to deal with later, or that call for you to perform a task, turn that into an action in your task list or GTD software immediately and then clear the message out of your inbox.
Creating actions from emails before clearing them out of your way is the best thing you can do for your email productivity. Keeping emails in the inbox because there is a task pending creates “email apathy” and things become unorganized and cluttered.

Alternative Solutions to Using All Mail

Using All Mail should work perfectly if you process each unread message as soon as you open it and read it, but perhaps it’s just not working for you. There are a few other ways to deal with this.
Starring All Email - the Star feature of Gmail is useful for marking items of interest that you want to come back to later (even though, under this system, we try to avoid that). If you don’t need or use this feature, you can make it work as a faux inbox. The star will indicate that a message needs to be processed.
Go back to the Filter setup window under Settings, and set the To: field to an asterisk (*). The To: field tells Gmail to select emails based on who the email is sent to, but the * tells it to pick up all email. We’ll go into the asterisk and its usefulness to filters in a moment.
Click Next Step and tick the “Star it” box. You now have a filter that stars all your incoming mail, and as you process each item, you can remove it from the list by clicking on the star, which is usually next to the “From” field in list view.
Not using automatic filters is another solution that I do not recommend. This takes all the power out of your system, but it will cause every email to flow straight into the inbox where you can process it into labels manually. I think this defeats the purpose and adds extra work that the computer can do for you, and in my experience it has been far from an optimal solution.

Using Asterisks in Filters

I mentioned the asterisk before when we talked about setting up a filter that stars your incoming mail. The asterisk, simple as it is, provides a very useful tool and provides more dynamic email filtering.
Let’s take a look at how it works. Say I have a regular client who has given me three different email addresses (it really does happen). I don’t want to have three labels for each one of those email addresses, and I want to basically treat them all as one. Using the asterisk we can achieve this really easily.
In the To: field of the filter setup, place an * before the rest of the domain name. So let’s say I have copywriter@unproductiveclient.com, editor@unproductiveclient.com and joel@unproductiveclient.com. To route all these email addresses into the one place, using one filter, all I have to do is set the To: field as *@unproductiveclient.com.
This works with the other fields, too. For instance, if I receive email from a whole bunch of people at one company to my main address and want to separate it from all my other mail, I can set the From: field to *@thatonecompany.com.

The + Hack

And finally, we have the + hack. This is great for pre-qualifying your email. Despite the fact that the sender may be a stranger you’ve never met or heard of before, you know what the email is about because it landed in the right label. Almost sounds like magic.
With Gmail, you can add a + add the end of your username with a keyword attached. For instance, if your email address is lifehack.example@gmail.com you can still receive messages directed to lifehack.example+invoices@gmail.com. Better yet, you can apply filters to these email addresses. I use this on my own site, where username+postideas@gmail.com goes to a Post Ideas label, and so on.
Better still, you can create semi-disposable email addresses without having to go create one with a disposable mail service. If a site is demanding your email address and you’re worried they’ll send you spam, just add a +sitename to your address and you can always filter that material to the Trash later on.
Stay tuned for more advice on setting up a productive email system with Gmail.

I know it seems hard to believe, but your Google Talk contacts will become... your Google Friends. Everything started last year with an innocent addition to Google Reader: automatically broadcasting your shared items to your friends. If you use Google Reader, you probably noticed that you're subscribed to the shared items from your Google Talk contacts. Many complained that their Google Talk contact list includes many people that are not necessarily friends. "I have business contacts, school contacts, family contacts, etc., and not only do I not really have any interest in seeing all of their feed information, I don't want them seeing mine either," explained a Google Reader user.





But how does someone become your friend in Google Talk? You can send or accept an invitation, but there's another option enabled by default: "Gmail automatically determines which contacts you'll be able to talk to without having to invite each other," based on how frequently you mail each other. And since Gmail contacts include all the people you've ever replied to, you'll end up with a new Google Talk friend after replying 2-3 times to someone's messages.



Here's a screenshot from the recently launched Google Friend Connect, a service that brings social features to ordinary web sites. As you can see, Google Talk is listed next to Facebook, orkut and hi5.





The invisible social network needed a way to expose information about its users, so you can now create a Google Profile. There's even a shortcut for accessing your profile: http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/me.



But without a place where you can share interesting stuff with your friends, Google Talk would be just a virtual social network. iGoogle, the site where you can aggregate all the things you find important, will become Google's main social site when the new version of iGoogle will be released. Among other features, the new iGoogle will add a Google Talk widget, support for OpenSocial applications and a gadget that shows updates from your friends. iGoogle's gadgets and presumably some Google services will be able to push updates to an activity stream that will be shared with your friends, which happen to be the Google Talk contacts. That means your GTalk contacts will be informed when you share a post in Google Reader, when you upload photos in Picasa Web Albums or post a review in Google Maps.





This is actually the Maka-Maka project revealed last year in a confidential Google video that has been accidentally published. "The new central place for social activities will create feeds for all or your events (activity streams) and share them with your contacts," I mentioned in that post.



That means Google Reader's sharing feature was just a rehearsal for a much bigger release that will make the hidden Google Talk social network more visible.

It's likely that a normal Gmail users didn't notice that Gmail has a lot of limitations for sending messages. Here are some of them, as mentioned in a mail from Google:

- 500 messages per day (i.e., you can hit 'Send' a maximum of 500 times)
- 500 unique recipients per message
- 2000 total emails per day (for example, you could send one message to a group of 500 people four times)

In addition to these limitations, "Google will temporarily disable your account if you send a message to more than 500 recipients or if you send a large number of undeliverable messages". According to the help center, you can only send a message to up to 100 people at a time if you use POP or IMAP.

Google explains that these restrictions were created to fight against spam and to prevent abuse. The same rules are enforced for Google Apps users, as well.

Om Malik thinks that "500 messages are nothing in this day and age, especially if you are in the information business as I am" and wonders why Google doesn't list all these restrictions.

Often, the features we launch seem so simple that you might think they're the result of blatantly obvious design decisions. In fact, every feature is subjected to a healthy dose of scrutiny within the Gmail team, and usually that includes rapidly iterating on designs by collecting user feedback, learning what works and what doesn't, and improving on our work based on this knowledge.

Gmail chat is a great example of this: we went through handfuls of design ideas, from the tame to the insane, before coming up with the pop-up chat window (which is also called a chat "mole") that exists today. Here are a couple of the early ideas we tried out:

Chat within threads, making chats feel strongly related to the emails that may have spurred them:



Separate tabs for each chat conversation, which provided lots of space for chatting and kept these conversations separate from the inbox:

We took each of these ideas into the usability lab where users were asked to try them out and tell us what they thought. From these studies we learned that chatting was one of many multi-tasking activities that users performed, and that chats needed to be quickly available at any time, not just within a single email or on in a separate page. So we tried a design reminiscent of a sticky note that stayed up on the page at all times:


Once again, we collected feedback on this design, leading to even more refinements. One of the biggest findings was that no one knew how to send a message because there was no Send button. Adding instructions (initially with a bright yellow background, and later with a more subtle design) made all the difference:


With chat and other features, collecting live feedback from real users helps evolve feature ideas into simple and more elegant experiences. These extra steps may add a little time to our development cycle, but they allow us to create a design that works well for the tens of millions of Gmail users.

Windows/Mac/Linux: Firefox extension Xoopit turns Gmail into a robust, searchable media management tool for every piece of media that comes through your inbox. By indexing every attachment as well as every link to photos and videos from sites like Flickr, Picasa, and YouTube, Xoopit allows you to easily search for and find any picture or video and view it from directly inside Gmail. Imagine this: You're looking for a YouTube video that you were sent a link to recently, but you really don't know where to begin your search. With Xoopit installed, you can just click the Videos tab and you'll see this:

Finding that video becomes a lot easier at this point, but you can narrow down the search even further by sorting the results, filtering by sender, or searching for the words associated with the video (even if all the original email contained was a link).

Today, Xoopit has also integrated their media search with Gmail's search box so you can get media results when you search Gmail the regular way (see their demo video for more). Once you're viewing a video or picture in Gmail using Xoopit, you can even post it to Facebook or to your blog directly from Gmail (WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, and LiveJournal are all supported).

Overall, Xoopit sounds (and is) pretty great, but there is a catch, and it's kind of a big one: You need to be willing to turn over your Gmail password to Xoopit to allow them into your inbox to index all of your email. It would be excellent to see this sort of functionality incorporated directly into Gmail so you don't need to trust a third-party with your inbox. However, if you give it a try and are unhappy with Xoopit, you can email Xoopit support and have your account deleted.

Xoopit is free, works wherever Firefox does. They're currently in a private beta, but they've promised access to Lifehacker readers who follow the signup link below. As soon as you sign up, Xoopit will start indexing your media. You should start seeing indexed content in a few minutes, and all of the media in your inbox should be indexed in under 24 hours. If you give it a try, let's hear how you like it in the comments.

Last week we launched Gmail Labs, a way for you to test out experimental Gmail features before they're ready for prime time. This week, we want to show you what the most popular Labs features can do for your inbox. To use any Gmail Labs feature* visit the Labs tab under Settings, and select “Enable” next to each one you want to turn on. When you're finished picking features, click “Save changes” to apply the new settings. Here's a mini guide to the most popular ones:
Superstars: Adds new star designs to better differentiate important email.
After enabling Superstars, simply click on the star icon repeatedly to rotate through new star options. If you have shortcuts enabled, hitting the “s” key consecutively will do the same. There are more star designs then the ones set as default -- to select different variations, click Settings and look for the Superstars section under the General tab. Drag the icons listed as “not in use” to “in use” to make changes to your star lineup. Once enabled, you can use Superstars to help prioritize and manage emails. For example, you can add a "!" icon star on emails that have critical or timely information, such as bank information, or you can add a "✓" icon star to emails associated with a task you've completed, such as paying a bill online.Pictures in chat: Adds your friends' photos to the chat window.Make Gmail chat a little more personal. Now you can view a picture of your friends when you chat with them. (Tip: If your friend doesn't have a picture, you can suggest one by clicking on the placeholder picture in Contacts under your friend's name).Quick Links: Bookmarks common Gmail views.Quick Links allows you to create a shortcut to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. Just click "Add Quick Link" to save a link to the page you are currently viewing. You can then jump to that page any time with one click. For example, you can add a link to a draft email where you keep your to do list, or an email with your frequent flyer information. You can also save a common Gmail search by conducting the search (let's say for "is:unread" -- which brings up all your unread mail) and then clicking "Add Quick Link."If you have suggestions for ways we can improve any of the Labs features, or want to suggest a new one, please visit our Labs discussion forum. The engineers who built Gmail Labs features keep an eye on discussions, and your feedback will help them make the features great.
via Official Gmail Blog

Lifehacker Australia features a clever way to compose new Gmail messages in Firefox—using the built-in search box. To install the Gmail compose search plug-in, click on this link (it's safe, we promise), then click on the "OpenSearch plug-in Mail" link to get a Gmail envelope option in your search box. Choose the Gmail envelope, and enter the destination address to start a new message. (Remember, Ctrl+K will put your cursor in the box, and Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down arrow will navigate the list of search engines.) Nifty! Search box power users, load up on some more useful search plug-ins here.

As promised last week, Gmail added a labs section to showcase some new experimental features created by Google engineers.

Gmail Labs allows you to try out experimental new features in Gmail and send feedback to us so we can improve them. If you're going to brave the Labs world, it's important to keep the following things in mind about these features:

* They may break at any time
* Similarly, they may disappear temporarily or permanently
* They may work so well that they graduate and become regular features

The labs section is available as a new settings tab in the English version of Gmail (you could change your language to see it) and it includes 13 new features: some are very useful, other are just for fun. You need to enable each one to see it in action, but unlike Google Experimental Search, you can enable more than one experimental feature at a time.


Here are some of the most useful new features:
* quick links - a new module displayed below Gmail Chat that lets bookmark Gmail views. For example, you can search for something and then click on "add to quick links" to save the search in the sidebar. This can also be used to bookmark important conversations or settings sections. I suggested in an earlier post some useful Gmail queries.

* super-stars - if you use Gmail's star for different things (flag important conversations, flag conversations for follow-up) and you want to differentiate them, you now have more icons for starring messages. Just click on the star repeatedly to toggle between the different states. The feature is very limited because you can't search for messages that were starred with a different icon.


* custom keyboard shortcuts - if you find the current shortcuts offered by Gmail strange and unintuitive, you can remap them. After enabling this feature, a new Settings tab will let you choose the shortcuts for some of the most useful actions. For example, you can replace the "!" shortcut with the more intuitive "S" for marking messages as spam.

* mouse gestures should be familiar to Opera users. You can move your mouse in a direction and associate this movement with an action. Here's what you can do in Gmail: "hold right-click and move the mouse left to go to a previous conversation, move it right to go to the next conversation, and move up to go back to the inbox view."

The other 9 features are less interesting, but some people could still find some use for them:
* show avatars in Gmail chat
* view messages in fixed width font
* place the signature before the quoted text (many Gmail users complained about this in the past)
* random signature from a feed (you can use Google to find some feeds)
* custom date formats
* hide your friends' status messages in Gmail chat
* Snake - that's right, you can now play "Old Snakey" inside Gmail.


* email addict - 15 minutes of break from Gmail for those who need to do other things than reading their mail
* hide unread count - you'll no longer see in the sidebar the number of unread messages from your inbox, the spam folder or other labels.

All in all, there are some useful features and Google promises to monitor people's interest and add the most popular features in the standard Gmail. Hopefully, users will be able to write their own plugins and submit them to a library of Gmail features.

Google insisted that these new features were written by Google engineers in theri 20% time, so they're far from being polished. "There is a code review vetting process to make sure it doesn't break, but no user interface analysis or product analysis. It just has to be functional code to push out. Features can literally modify anything in the Gmail code base," mentions TechCrunch. If something goes wrong, you can temporarily disable Gmail Labs and enter in safe mode by visiting http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0.
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We have a lot ideas for Gmail -- many come as suggestions from Gmail users, many come from people here at Google. But there's only so much we can do at any one time.

People often ask how we decide what to build next. It's usually a mix of factors, like how many users are asking for it (think delete button, vacation responder, and IMAP, among others), how useful we think it will be (think chat, conversation view, etc.) or how much fun it will be to work on (this is actually really important). We have all sorts of debates about each option, we weigh the pros and cons, and then some of the time we probably make the wrong decision.

Gmail Labs is a way for us to take lots of the ideas we wouldn't normally pick and let you all (who use Gmail) decide whether they're good or not. When you sign in, you'll see a new page in Settings called Labs. It has a list of experimental new features, and you can enable or disable each one. Some of the popular ones will become core parts of the product, and we'll eventually retire the ones that don't get much use. We've put feedback links in there, too, so you can discuss a feature with other users and the engineer(s) who wrote it.


One of the things that we like about working at Google is that it lets us have a big, positive influence and at the same time experiment rapidly, getting ideas to users very quickly. That combo of size and speed is something we care about a lot, and we've designed a culture and company that makes it possible.

The idea behind Labs is that any engineer can go to lunch, come up with a cool idea, code it up, and ship it as a Labs feature. To tens of millions of users. No design reviews, no product analysis, and to be honest, not that much testing. Some of the Labs features will occasionally break. (There's an escape hatch.)

The result of this loosely-directed chaos is 13 Labs features, with more on the way. Some of them we've found really useful, like Quick Links, which lets you save searches and any other views in Gmail. Kai and Julie wrote Superstars, which gives you different types of stars. Dave wrote Old Snakey, which lets you play an old school style computer game when you press "&". I'm just going to go out and say it: Old Snakey is probably a bad idea. But Dave wanted to do it, so Dave did it and anyone who uses Gmail can use it. And now you can help decide whether it's a good idea. That's the kind of thing that makes a project fun to work on.

You’ve seen Gmail in Hindi but now this popular email program from Google is available in all major languages of India including اردو (Urdu) , मराठी (Marathi), हिन्दी (Hindi), বাংলা (Bangla), ગુજરાતી (Gujarati), ଓଡିଆ (Oriya), தமிழ் (Tamil), తెలుగు (Telugu), ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada) and മലയാളം (Malayalam).

I think this would cover 90% of the 1 billion strong population of India.

To switch to a different language in Gmail, go to the Settings tab and selection a different languages from the Gmail display language drop down. Don’t forget to save your changes.