Gmail gets new features

Your favorite webmail – "Gmail" has got a new set of features. Yes really. Didn’t you notice? No problems we will find them and enable them! Actually this time there is no link on the top right corner letting you know that you can try some of the new features.

[UPDATE: The link is now there, it was not at the time of writing. I am faster than Google!]

The new set ( yes there is a complete set of new features) can be found in a tab named "Labs" if you to the "Settings" page. As you know with all Google Labs products, these products mature and make their way into the mainstream line. See the graduates of Google Code.

Where to find the features

 

Back to the features at this moment there are 13 features which you can use. You can enable or disable every single one of them independently. Here is a complete list of the features you can use:

Some of the features

 

• Quick Links
  • Adds a box to the left column that gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You can use it for saving frequent searches, important individual messages, and more.
• Superstars
  
  • Adds additional star icons. After enabling this feature, you can choose which icons you wish to use in the "General" Settings page.
• Pictures in chat
  • See your friends’ profile pictures when you chat with them.
• Fixed width font
  • Adds an option to the reply dropdown menu that lets you view a message in fixed width font.
• Custom keyboard shortcuts
  • Lets you customize keyboard shortcut mappings. Adds a new Settings tab from which you can remap keys to various actions.
• Mouse gestures
  
  • Use your mouse to navigate with gestures. 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. Works best on Windows.
• Signature tweaks
  
  • Places your signature before the quoted text in a reply, and removes the "–" line that appears before signatures. Can’t use this and the "Random signature" Labs feature at the same time.
• Random signature
  
  • Rotates among random quotations for your email signature. Can’t use this and the "Signature tweaks" Labs feature at the same time.
• Custom date formats
  • Adds options to the general settings page allowing the date and time format to be changed independent of language. For example, you can use a 24-hour clock (14:57) or show dates with the day first (31/12/07).
• Muzzle
  
  • Conserves screen real estate by hiding your friends’ status messages.
• Old Snakey
  • Kick it old school with Old Snakey! Enable keyboard shortcuts and hit ‘&’ from the main page to play a game of snake.
• Email Addict
  
  • Lets you take a break from email and chat by blocking the screen for fifteen minutes and making you invisible in chat.
• Hide Unread Counts
  
  • Hides the unread counts for inbox, labels, etc.

As you can see these are developed by different people(Gmail Engineers) , but more importantly what this suggests is that sometime in the future may be you will be able to write your own addons for Gmail. How cool would that be? Something like Firefox addons may be? Who knows. For the moment this seems a welcome addition to Gmail and don’t forget to send your feedback about the features to Google and about this article to me (you can send it to Google too but write good things!)

By the way do mention in the comments here which ones do you think you will use and which other features if any would you like to see in Gmail.

See Also:
Gmail Hacking

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