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The new themes have been added alongside the original default colour scheme, which has also been made "crisper and cleaner", having until now remained largely unchanged since the launch of the site in 2004.

"You might notice a few colours and pixels shifted around here and there," warns a post on the Google Mail blog.

The new themes include

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several simple options that change little of the original design but the colour palette, as well as some radical options such as the green-on-black terminal window and ninja-themed designs.

Themes can be found in a new tab on the settings page, although the feature is not yet rolled out to all users. Google, as usual with new features, is gradually giving access to users over a period of a couple of days.

The move is in part a reaction to demand from users for more customisation, which has already led to several third-party hacks.

"Gmail fans have been building unofficial extensions to spice up their inboxes for a while, but up till now themes haven't been an integral part of Gmail," says the post, referring to the use of third-party scripting tools such as Greasemonkey that allow users to change GMail's colour scheme.

The webmail service has received a handful of updates in recent weeks. Last week a video and audio chat feature was added to the tool, integrating the company's existing Google Talk VoIP tool.