Gmail
Email overload? Try Priority Inbox
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
Another very interesting Gmail improvement: "Priority Inbox":
Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn't outright junk but isn't very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we've evolved Gmail's filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this "bologna" from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.
Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:
As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the or buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)
After lots of internal testing here at Google, as well as with Gmail and Google Apps users at home and at work, we’re ready for more people to try it out. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so. Once you see the "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look.
Easier event scheduling in Google Calendar
Google improved Google Calendar scheduling inside Gmail:
A new repeating event editor
The old interface for creating recurring events was clumsy and took up too much space on the screen. Now you'll see only a summary of your recurring event on the main event page; if you want to edit it, you can use a window that opens when you select the "Repeats" checkbox.
A new tool to help you find a time for your event
You'll notice a new tab on the event page that should make it easier to find a good time to schedule an event. When your friends or coworkers give you permission to see their calendars, you can click this tab to see a preview of their schedules and hover over their events to see what conflicts they might have. This should make scheduling a tad easier, especially for events with large numbers of guests. For Google Apps users, the new schedule preview can also show data from other calendar services using our Google Calendar Connectors API.
Call phones from Gmail (for U.S. users only)
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Is Gmail's voice and video chat becoming a serious Skype competition? Now, it even supports calling to normal phones.
The new feature is only available for Gmail users in the USA. Hopefully, this will change some day.
Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”
Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.
Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.
New Gmail lab feature: Find docs and sites quickly with Apps Search
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Google is famous for its search, but search in Google Apps documents or Gmail attachments was rather lacking. Here's a new lab feature to improve search in Google Apps and Gmail:
Where is that presentation? Was it attached to an email? Or in Google Docs? If you’re not sure, you may end up searching several places with the same query in order to find it. With the new “Apps Search” lab, we just made that all a bit simpler.
Once you enable it from the Gmail Labs tab under Settings, the “Search Mail” button in Gmail will say “Search Mail and Docs” instead, and your search results will include matching documents and sites in addition to email messages.
We also added “Did you mean?” style suggestions, for those of us who make mistakes (who doesn’t?):
You may notice that mail results show up just as fast as before while non-mail results may take a tiny bit longer. That way, if you’re just looking for an email, having this lab enabled won’t slow you down.
Galactic Inbox: An HTML5 game inspired by Gmail
The Gmail blog mentions a special Gmail game implemented with HTML5.
Here's the direct link
Updates to Contacts and a (slightly) new look for Gmail
You certainly already noticed it. Google has updated the look and feel of Gmail and contacts:
Contacts now works more like the rest of Gmail, so if you know how to use Gmail, now you should automatically feel comfortable in Contacts too. And you'll see a bunch of the features you've requested, including:
- Keyboard shortcuts (go to Contacts and hit "?" for the full list)
- Sort by last name (look under "More actions")
- Custom labels for phone numbers and other fields
- The ability to undo changes you've just made
- Automatic saving
- Structured name fields, so you can adjust titles, suffixes, and other name components
- A bigger, more prominent notes field
Gmail Rich text signatures
This is old news as I am currently catching up with the Gmail blog.
Gmail now offers Rich text signatures, too. They are very easy to setup and support different from addresses:
The next time you log in and visit the Settings page, you'll see a rich text editor in the signature section. Here, you can customize your signature by adding pretty formatting, links, and images — or decide to leave things nice and simple.
Gmail also now supports a unique signature for each email address associated with your account. So, if you send mail using a custom "From:" address, you can use a different signature for that address. From the Settings page, you can edit the signature for each account by changing the email address that appears in the dropdown menu.
You can continue to use Mailplane's rich text signatures. Here are the differences:
- In Mailplane you can use HTML to define your signature. This gives you more freedom, but it is more involved as you need to know HTML.
- Mailplane signatures work in Mailplane only. The Gmail signatures work in all desktop browsers.
- You can define more Mailplane signatures and easily replace a signature with a keystroke.
Mailplane signatures - more info:
Grandmother’s guide to Gmail video chat
Friday, July 02, 2010
View .doc attachments right in Mailplane
Friday, June 25, 2010
Google improved the attachment viewer in Gmail. You can now directly preview a Microsoft Word document:
If you receive Microsoft® Word files as attachments in Gmail, you can now view them with a single click — no need to download, save, and open files with a desktop application when you just want read them. The Google Docs viewer that allows you to view .pdf, .ppt, and .tiff files in your browser now supports .doc and .docx formats too.Just click the "View" link at the bottom of a Gmail message and the viewer will take it from there. If you decide you want to edit the file, clicking "Edit online" will open it in Google Docs, or you can download it to your desktop from there.
Gmail video and voice chat improvements
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
Google has improved Google video and voice chats. The new toolbar now lets you easily install the video chat internet plugin. Here's the difference:
You'll find oldie but goodie features such as "Go off the record," "Block", and "Send SMS" in a more aptly named "Actions" menu of each chat window.
10 tips for using Gmail at work
Friday, May 28, 2010
Google published 10 useful tips for business users.
Tip #2 is "Add a custom signature to the bottom of your email messages." In case you need multiple signatures and you like to add formatting and pictures, check out Mailplane's rich text signatures. Here are some how-to articles:
- Setup your first signature
- Add a signature for another “from” email address
- Insert a different signature
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New Gmail lab feature: Move the attachment and other icon column
There's a new lab feature available: "Move Icon Column":
The icon column in Gmail helps to easily distinguish the various types of items in your inbox (e.g. messages with attachments, chats, calendar invitations, Buzz posts, and more). It's usually all the way over on the right of the screen, but with screen sizes becoming increasingly wider, I chose to make a very modest addition to Gmail Labs to try and give these icons greater visibility.
I found it much more useful to have this column situated on the far left of my inbox -- and it turns out that many of my colleagues did too.
If you’d like try out "Move Icon Column," simply visit the Labs tab under Gmail Settings, find this new Lab in the list, hit enable, and then save. It’s not big and it’s not clever but hopefully this lab might just be helpful for you too; it's the little things in life after all.
New Google Tool: Migrating from Microsoft Outlook
Google published a new tool to easily migrate your Microsoft Outlook mail, calendars, and personal contacts. The migration tool available for Education and Premier Google Apps users. Read the Google announcement here.
Detecting suspicious Gmail account activity
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Google added a new Gmail account security feature. It'll alert you if your Gmail account gets accessed from another country:
To determine when to display this message, our automated system matches the relevant IP address, logged per the Gmail privacy policy, to a broad geographical location. While we don't have the capability to determine the specific location from which an account is accessed, a login appearing to come from one country and occurring a few hours after a login from another country may trigger an alert. By clicking on the "Details" link next to the message, you'll see the last account activity window that you're used to, along with the most recent access points.
Gmail Blog: Better controls for buzz in your inbox
Monday, March 15, 2010
For many users, the Buzz inbox notifications got too noisy. According to this article on the official Gmail blog, Google has worked on two improvements:
1) Settings to control what gets sent to your inbox
From the Buzz tab of Gmail Settings, you’ll be able to choose whether the following buzz items get sent to your inbox:
- Comments on your posts
- Comments on posts after you comment on them
- Comments on posts after you are @replied on them
2) Explanations for why posts get sent to your inbox and an easy-to-find “Mute” link
You'll see a new message at the top of each post in your inbox that explains why it’s there: someone commented on your post, you were @replied, etc. We’ve also added an easy-to-find “mute” link that will stop subsequent comments from bringing the conversation back to your inbox.
