Improved Boomerang Plugin
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
The Boomerang plugin (by Baydin) just got some improvements. It is now possible to schedule email in a "separate" compose window, for instance.
And Boomerang got a lot faster and easier to use, too. Check out their blog post for all details
Click here to learn more about the Mailplane integration
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Gmail Lab features: 3 Labs graduations, 1 retirement
Thursday, June 02, 2011
The "Superstars", "Nested Labels", and "Advanced IMAP Controls" all graduated to normal Gmail features. Google decided to retire the "Google search box" lab feature.
Introducing the Gmail people widget
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
I personally use Rapportive to learn more about the people behind the emails. However, some of you are might be more interested about the interactions that you’ve had with a person rather than the social networks on which they appear. Seeing and solving that lack of context, [Google has introduced a People Widget for Gmail(http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/introducing-people-widget.html):
Email is just as much about the people you communicate with as it is what you communicate about. We think it can be helpful to view relevant information in context, which is why over the next two weeks we’re rolling out a new people widget located on the right hand side of your messages. The people widget surfaces content from friends, family and colleagues that is already available to you but may be hard to find and makes it easier to connect with them.
Next to every email message you can now see contextual information about the people in that conversation including recent emails you received from them, relevant Buzz posts, shared documents and calendar events. You also have quick access to a variety of ways to communicate with individuals, start a group chat or schedule a meeting with groups of people.
Mailplane 2.4 released
Monday, May 16, 2011
NEW: Evernote Integration
With the new Mailplane Evernote integration you can easily create notes linking to a Mailplane conversation and import attachments to Evernote.
Other improvements & Bug fixes:
- UPDATED: French, German, Japanese, Romanian and Swedish translation
- FIX: Quick Links didn't show up in Mail > Goto > Navigate.
- FIX: Mailplane shared cookies with Safari when used on Mac OS X Lion
- FIX: Main window did show up when starting Mailplane as hidden startup item.
- FIX: Delay error message when no network was available at startup.
- FIX: Exporting MS-Word from Google Docs didn't work
- FIX: Help window didn't show correct title
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Gmail: Store up to 25000 contacts
Thursday, May 05, 2011
Gmail now stores more contacts and increases the maximum size of a contact:
Gmail used to have a limit of 10,000 contacts. For most of us, this was way more than enough, but we heard from some of you who use Gmail to communicate with more than 10,000 people. We want you to be able to store all of your contacts in a single place, so starting today, we’ve increased the limit for all Gmail users, including all those of you who use Google Apps, to 25,000 contacts.
Also, previously an individual contact could be no larger than 32KB — big enough for most people, but not always sufficient for those who like to keep a lot of notes on individual contacts. Now, each contact may be up to 128KB in size, allowing you to store more information in the notes field.
New Gmail Lab Feature: Background Send
Monday, May 02, 2011
Last week, Google published a new Gmail lab to make sending messages faster:
We’re always looking for ways to make Gmail faster. One of the most common delays happens after you hit that “Send” button, when you’re waiting patiently for a couple seconds for Gmail to send your message. If you send a lot of email, that can add up to a lot of lost time.
To help give you that time back, there’s a new feature in Gmail Labs called Background Send. Once you turn it on from the Labs tab in Settings, you can get on with what you’re doing while Gmail quietly sends off your mail in the background. You can keep reading your inbox, compose new messages, chat with people — all the things you’d usually do. You can even send more than one message in the background at the same time.
If anything goes wrong (maybe you got that email address wrong, or maybe your connection had a hiccup), you’ll see a warning message that prompts you to go back and fix the issue or try again later.
The “Send error” message will stay around until you decide to fix things, so you don’t have to stop whatever you’re doing right away. The only catch is that you should wait for your mail to finish sending before you close Gmail or shut down your computer. If messages are still being sent in the background when you shut down, your messages are probably going to be lost. You’ll know you’re good to go when you see a message like this:
Custom background image themes
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Google just announced custom background image themes:
Themes in Gmail are great — there are tons to choose from and they give your inbox a personalized look. But we’ve heard from many of you who thought it would be even better if you could give Gmail an even more personalized look and create themes completely on your own.
For a while, you’ve been able to set your own colors, and starting today you can customize your inbox with your own background image too.
Just go to the Themes tab in Settings and choose “Create your own theme.” There, you can select background images for the main area and the footer.
You can pick from any of your Picasa images or upload a new one. Enjoy!
Mailplane 2.3.1 released
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Release notes:
- NEW: Support for the Boomerang Gmail plugin: Boomerang for Gmail lets you take control of when you send and receive email messages. To install: Go to Preferences > Accounts > Plug-Ins and enable the plugin.
- NEW: Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion)
- DISABLED: TrueNew Plugin
- FIX: Attach files doesn't work on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
- FIX: Rapportive plugin was not able to login
- FIX: Possible fix for the external links didn't open in Firefox.
- FIX: Auto-BCC caused focus to jump to BCC field.
- FIX: Window sizes were not remembered.
- UPDATED: French, Swedish, Romanian, Japanese, German, and Spanish translations
- AUTO-UPDATED (new preferences are English): Catalan, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified)
Note to App Store users: The update has been submitted yesterday, it'll soon be reviewed by Apple.
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Lyn image browser supports Mailplane
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Mirko Viviani just released Lyn 1.0.2 with Mailplane integration. Lyn is lightweight and fast image browser that natively supports all popular image formats like JPEG, TIFF, JPEG 2000, PNG, TGA, RAW, HDR, OpenEXR, PPM, animated GIF and any other image format supported by Mac OS X.
To email a picture from within Lyn, select some pictures and press the Mail toolbar item. Just make sure Mailplane is your default email client, the setting can be found in Mailplane > Preferences > Advanced.
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Time Magazine: Mailplane is one of the ‘four ways to make Gmail better’
Friday, March 25, 2011
Time magazine's Techland published 'four ways to Make Gmail better'. Among them, Rapportive, 0boxer, Gmail Mobile, and Mailplane:
Mailplane. If you use Gmail on a Mac, this utility lets it run like a standalone app rather than a Web site. It's particularly handy if you have more than one Gmail account. $24.95 (after a free trial) and worth it.
Switching to Gmail got easier
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Visit the Gmail switch page to move from your old Email account to Gmail:
Switching email accounts can be painful. The idea of losing years of accumulated contacts and messages can sound daunting, to say the least. Luckily, switching to Gmail doesn’t mean you have to start totally fresh.
Back in 2009 we announced tools that let you import mail and contacts from other providers, such as AOL or Hotmail. Today we’re announcing the addition of fourteen more international domains to our list of supported email providers:
- aol.com.br
- hotmail.es
- hotmail.it
- hotmail.co.jp
- Kimo.com
- live.jp
- yahoo.es
- yahoo.cn
- yahoo.com.cn
- yahoo.com.hk
- yahoo.com.sg
- yahoo.com.tw
- yahoo.co.jp
- yahoo.it
We’ve also created a site, gmail.com/switch, with basic information and how and why you might want to switch to Gmail. If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re already a Gmail user, but perhaps this link will be handy for friends and family.
Gmail: Click to call phone numbers
Friday, March 11, 2011
Gmail now detects phone numbers in emails and will convert them to clickable links:
With the ability to call phones built right into Gmail, you no longer have to get out your phone and retype a number anytime someone sends you one in an email or chat message. Starting today, you’ll see that phone numbers appear as links, like this:
Just click the number, and Gmail’s dialpad will pop up, already populated with the number you’re trying to call.
Click “Call” and voilà! Of course, if you don’t already have the voice and video plugin installed, you’ll be prompted to do that first.
You’ll also see a little green phone icon next to numbers in your contacts which you can use to do the same thing.
New Gmail lab feature: Smart Labels
The new "Smart Labels" lab feature automatically filters messages according to "Priority Inbox" information. You'll get Bulk, Notifications, and Forums folders:
Last year, we launched Priority Inbox to automatically sort incoming email and help you focus on the messages that matter most. Today, we're launching a complementary feature in Gmail Labs called Smart Labels, which helps you classify and organize your email. Once you turn it on from the Labs tab in Settings, Smart Labels automatically categorizes incoming Bulk, Notification and Forum messages, and labels them as such. “Bulk” mail includes any kind of mass mailing (such as newsletters and promotional email) and gets filtered out of your inbox by default (where you can easily read it later), “Notifications” are messages sent to you directly (like account statements and receipts), and email from group mailing lists gets labeled as “Forums.”
If you already use filters and labels to organize your mail, you may find that you can replace your existing filters with Smart Labels. If you're picky like me and still want to hold on to your current organization system, Smart Labels play nice with other labels and filters too. On the Filters tab under Settings, you'll find that these filters can be edited just like any others. From there, you can also edit your existing filters to avoid having them Smart Labeled or change whether mail in a Smart Label skips your inbox (which you can also do by just clicking on the label, then selecting or unselecting the checkbox in the top right corner).
Gmail back soon for everyone
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
0.02% of all Gmail users temporarly lost access to their accounts. According to Google, this problem should be fixed very soon. For status updates, visit the "Apps Status Dashboard".
Here's the contents of the Gmail blog post:
Imagine the sinking feeling of logging in to your Gmail account and finding it empty. That’s what happened to 0.02% of Gmail users yesterday, and we’re very sorry. The good news is that email was never lost and we’ve restored access for many of those affected. Though it may take longer than we originally expected, we're making good progress and things should be back to normal for everyone soon.
I know what some of you are thinking: how could this happen if we have multiple copies of your data, in multiple data centers? Well, in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data. That’s what happened here. Some copies of mail were deleted, and we’ve been hard at work over the last 30 hours getting it back for the people affected by this issue.
To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs. But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds.
So what caused this problem? We released a storage software update that introduced the unexpected bug, which caused 0.02% of Gmail users to temporarily lose access to their email. When we discovered the problem, we immediately stopped the deployment of the new software and reverted to the old version.
As always, we’ll post a detailed incident report outlining what happened to the Apps Status Dashboard, as well as the corrective actions we’re taking to help prevent it from occurring again. If you were affected by this issue, it’s important to note that email sent to you between 6:00 PM PST on February 27 and 2:00 PM PST on February 28 was likely not delivered to your mailbox, and the senders would have received a notification that their messages weren’t delivered.
Dealing with label overload
Monday, February 28, 2011
New Gmail settings to help you cope with many labels:
Many Gmail power users have elaborate label systems to help organize their mail -- some help file and retrieve mail, others help manage their attention.
We created the “Hide read labels” and “Hide Labels from Subjects” labs to help people manage their ever-growing lists of labels. Given the popularity and usefulness of these labs, we’ve decided to graduate them into fully-fledged features. We’ve also made a few improvements to how they work. First, instead of simply hiding all labels from subject lines, you can now choose which labels to show or hide. We also spiffed up and organized the Labels tab in Settings as well as the dropdown menus for each label in the label list.
If you had enabled either Labs feature, your settings should automatically be carried over. If there was a glitch in the matrix, or if you want to change the visibility for a bunch of labels quickly, you can adjust them en masse by going to the Labels tab in Settings.
