Turn on GMail’s hidden features

Friday, October 31st, 2008

GMail’s a superb tool – one that I shudder to think about living without – but it’s old. Since it emerged in 2004 it’s hardly changed at all, except for that constantly ticking maximum storage size (which is over 7GB now, I was surprised to see). Would a new feature every now and then kill Google?

To be fair, little tweaks do arrive every now and then. The SMS feature which has been gathering attention today, for example, but they’re often not enabled by default. Google keeps that BETA tag on the logo, though, so there’s really no reason for it to be squeamish about making updates.

If you’ve never tried, then you should dabble with some of these experimental features. Pop to your settings page from within GMail, then the Labs tab. Here you’ll find loads of interesting tweaks that you can turn on. (more…)