The 10 best GMail Labs upgrades

Friday, July 10th, 2009

GMail already knocks rival webmail services into a cocked hat with its speed, storage capacity and breadth of features. However, there are plenty more power tools lurking in the ever fertile GMail Labs, which can help you tailor the service to your own needs.

To access GMail Labs, click on the little green science beaker icon next to your email address at the top of the GMail window.

1. Quick Links

Quick Links is an excellent tool for power users. It allows you to create one-click shortcuts to specific searches – so you could, for example, have easy access to any emails mentioning your company or a particular person. To create a Quick Link, type your search term into the GMail search bar and then click Add Quick Link from the Quick Links box in the left-hand panel (which only appears after you’ve enabled the Quick Links feature).

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GMail goes back to beta

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

Google may have brought GMail out of beta yesterday to allay the fears of business users, but it seems some GMail users are equally spooked out by the disappearance of that little beta tag after five long years.

Google, as ever, has the answer. A new GMail Labs feature called Back to Beta that “soothes the soul by putting the familiar beta sticker back on the Google Mail logo”.

Nice work.

(Thanks to PC Pro forum member MattLevy for the tip off)

Switching from Hotmail to Gmail

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Last week I decided to take the plunge and switch from Hotmail to Gmail. I’ve been flirting with the idea for a while, tempted by the never-ending upgrades and conversation-view email layout. The thing that had always held me back was that I’ve been a Hotmail user for over ten years. There were a lot of emails in that account that I didn’t want to lose, so I procrastinated. Which was daft, because switching is incredibly easy and you don’t have to lose a thing. It goes a bit like this.

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New Gmail “outage” sets Twitter alight

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

Twitter is once again ablaze with rumours of a fresh Gmail outage. This one doesn’t appear to be as severe as last month’s two-and-a-half-hour blackout and most of the Twitterverse (sorry) is reporting that the service is back on its feet again.

The graph taken from Twitscoop below shows how quickly word spreads when Google’s mail service takes a nap:

With Twitter, it seems you can’t sneeze without someone reporting it. 

The perils of cloud computing (part II)

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Following hot on the heels of Jon Honeyball’s warning about the dangers of cloud computing, comes another all too real example from no lesser source than the Google press office, commenting on this morning’s Gmail outage:

“I’d send you this statement by email, but I can’t”.  

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…)

Google puts on the Mail Goggles

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

Last week I opened Facebook to find the following status update from one of my friends:

“Ilana Drunk with love people with I love. I love m best friends who talk. Farmers weekly f***** hell.”

(And before the pedants start commenting about my over-zealous use of the asterisk, she was so inebriated she’d even managed to misspell the f word.) 

I should explain that Ilana is a writer, and a bloody good writer at that, having had her first novel published by Orion and a second on the way. She’s not normally the type of person who litters Facebook updates with jibberish. But until someone fits a breathaliser to her mobile phone, she will probably continue to make a proper Charlie of herself with booze-laden Facebook updates.

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Gmail [yawn] loading [yawn] bar

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

Google is a company that prides itself on doing things quickly. Bloody quickly.

At a briefing last week, Google’s head of mobile engineering, Ann Mei Chang told us: “Even on the desktop, shaving milliseconds off search times makes an appreciable difference to usage”.

So why, I wonder, has a progress bar started appearing every time I log into my Gmail account? It may not be any slower than it was previously and it’s good to have visual reassurance that the browser’s not crashed and Gmail is actually doing something, but for the first time I’ve begun to notice just how long Gmail takes to kick in.

From millisecond search to loading bars: not exactly progress, is it?