Juzer Burhani

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.

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

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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Google Labs is indeed busy with their creativity. Recently they released Google Talk Labs Edition with Features of the Google Talk Gadget on your desktop (emoticons, group chat, and more!)
Key elements:
* the password letters are hidden with square blocks instead of rounded ones.
* Contacts and chat in the same window
* cool emoticons
* Desktop reminders from Orkut, Google Calender, Gmail.

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.