Mac 101 just published a great Mailplane review:

If you’re like me, you love Gmail but feel its missing key functionality which puts a damper on your productivity in using Gmail in the browser. Coming from a corporate world, I love Outlook for windows just as much as I love Gmail. Yet I’ve never been satisfied with Mail.app, Entourage, or running a Virtual Machine or Emulator in order to run Outlook for Windows on a Mac. So you’re stuck using Gmail in a web browser, somewhere it lies lost in tab oblivion… getting no respect. I’m here to tell you Mailplane will change how you look at Gmail and massively increase your productivity and user experience within Gmail. So here it is, Gmail as we know and love it. Looks about the same on the surface, however what you see before you is Gmail turned into an Email Client. Don’t get discouraged, its better than you might think. Notice the Toolbar at the top, from here you can snap a screenshot and automatically insert it into an email, insert media, switch accounts, or bring up your Contacts in Address Book. This is just the surface, so lets dive into some of the goodies in Mailplane app.

Read the full blog post on the Mac 101 website.

Kudos to Mehmet Fatih Yigit: He contributed Turkish!

A few months ago Gmail got some new buttons and keyboard shortcuts to make labeling easier, especially for those of you accustomed to that familiar folder feel. Now we're making some more changes to Gmail's labeling toolkit.

1) New location for labels

You'll notice your labels in a new location on the left of your inbox (or on the right, for those of you using the Arabic, Hebrew, or Urdu versions of Gmail). Instead of having their own section, your labels are now above your chat list, grouped together with Inbox, Drafts, Chats and other system labels.

2) Label hiding and showing

You now have control over which of your labels show. We've done our best to get you started by automatically showing the labels you use most and hiding the rest. Label hiding is my favorite new feature, since it saves me from having to look through labels I rarely use. If I ever need to reach any of my old labels, I just click the "more" link.

You can show, hide, or delete a label by clicking the down-arrow to the left of that label.

If you want to make a lot of changes at once, go to the Labels tab under Settings where you can edit labels in bulk.

For those of you who created label names like _stuff or ++todo++ to force your most-used labels to the top of the list (come on, you know who you are, I did it too...), you don't have to come up with clever tricks like that anymore

3) Drag and drop

You can drag labels onto messages too. It's the same thing as using the "Label" button. To label or move many messages at once, first select the messages and then drag and drop the label.

It's also possible to drag labels into the "more" menu to hide them and vice versa. If you only want to move a couple labels around, I've found it quicker than going to Settings.

All of these changes also mean the end of Right-side Labels, an experimental Gmail Labs feature. This is the first Labs feature we're retiring. (The idea behind Labs was always that things could break or disappear at any time or they might work so well that they become regular features. More on that soon...) Now that labels aren't in their own little box and take up much less space, moving them around the screen didn't seem as important. We realize quite a few of you used and liked Right-side Labels, so if you feel strapped for left nav screen real estate without it, try turning on Right-side Chat in Labs instead.

We hope these new changes make labeling even easier and help you stay organized. We'll be rolling out these labeling features for everyone throughout the day, so if you don't see them right away please check later today.

Improve your Gmail skills and become real productive. Google has published a very useful tips and tricks page. It's also available as a nice printable guide.

Scott Willsey (MyMac.com) wrote a great review about Mailplane:

Mailplane has changed my entire mindset about email. I no longer deal with sync issues between computers. I no longer worry about managing local copies of everything. If you can wrap your brain around having your email in the cloud, or even if you just have a few Gmail accounts you want to manage in addition to some other email accounts that you do deal with through a regular email client, Mailplane makes things smooth and easy for you, just like using a regular email client. I recommend it to any heavy Gmail user on the Mac.

Check out the full review on MyMac.com

Simply enable "Message Translation" from the Labs tab under Settings, and when you receive an email in a language other than your own, Gmail will help you translate it into a language you can understand. In one click.

Supported languages.

Read the full Gmail blog post...

Dan Frakes has published an excellent Mailplane review:

One of my favorite features is that you can set up multiple Gmail accounts in Mailplane; select one in the Accounts drawer and click on Switch To, and Mailplane logs you out of the current account and into the new one. (You can’t log in to two accounts at the same time, however.) I also like Mailplane’s keyboard navigation: press Shift+G and a Navigate box pops up; type enough of the name of a Gmail view or label to uniquely identify it, and then press return to jump to that view. You can assign labels to messages and conversations using a similar procedure.

Mailplane receives a great "four mice" rating!

Read the full review at the Macworld site.

• UPDATED: Spanish and Chinese (Tranditional & Simplified).
• CHANGE: Renamed executable file back to "Mailplane" as the Video Chat plugin now recognizes Mailplane.
• FIX: Possible crash when unhiding the main window.
• FIX: Command-Shift-D didn't archive if you had the "Send and Archive" lab feature enabled.
• FIX: Disabled Gmail keyboard shortcuts warning didn't work
• FIX: Google Apps accounts were signed out when using Gmail lab features Doc/Calendar Gadgets.
• FIX: Send/Save/Discard commands didn't work correctly with enabled "Send & Archive Gmail lab feature

I used to have a problem. People would ask me questions, over chat or email, and I'd have to leave Gmail to search Google for an answer. Then I'd have to select the answer, copy it, go back to Gmail and paste the answer into the chat window or my reply. Sometimes I'd get distracted and forget to go back to Gmail, and I'd have to go through it all again when I remembered what I'd been doing.

Once you're sure it's a result you need, moving your mouse over the result back in Gmail reveals a pull-down menu that lets you do stuff with the search result. What's in the menu depends on what you're doing in Gmail:

• If you're reading a message, you can start a reply to the message with the search result as the first thing in your reply.
• If you're writing a message, you can paste the result, or just the URL into your message.
• If you're chatting with someone, you can send the result via chat.
• You can also always compose a new message to send the search result.

Read full blog post on Gmail Blog.