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Sunday, March 1, 2009

5 Superpowers your Gmail should have!

Here it is! The recipe to make the best Mailing service even better! With the Gmail team working hard to add more & more features to Gmail, it’s easy to miss out a few amazing ones. Make sure you try these out!

So here are the 5 new Gmail features that’ll surely boost your Gmail!

1. Arrange & Access your mails better using Multiple Inboxes!

So you’ve been adding loads of filters, organizing mails in labels (No? Then you better read my earlier post about 10 Gmail features you should know!). How about dividing your inbox so that some important labels are visible separately? At Gmail, if you ask for it, you get it! Just enable"Multiple Inbox" and start playing around! Here’s more in the Official post! Oh & you can view mails from multiple accounts arranged nicely like this

I’m currently using it do show my Facebook/Orkut/LinkedIn updates (Add me!) & MSP related mails next to my inbox. Sweet eh?

2. Labelling is now so much fun!

As you know, you can keep your mails in different labels (Everyone's doing it!). So the Gmail team was kind enough to give us to buttons on the top bar to help us easily add, remove labels from mails. So now it’s easy to apply a label and remove the mail from the inbox using the “Move To” option, or use the “Labels” menu to just add/remove a label (will not archive the mail). And yes, there’s an auto-complete too (No more scrolling through 30 labels!)
Here’s more on the Gmail blog
Oh & for those geeks out there, you can press “v” for “Move To” & “l” for “Labels” menu. Yey!

3. Offline Gmail – No more worries about your slow connection!

Ever since Gmail became a part of our life, we’ve been screaming at our internet connection for not behaving nicely. Don’t worry, just enable “Offline Gmail” from the Labs and easily use Gmail even when you’re disconnected/have a slow connection. You need to go online once a while though to refresh your inbox (Mails won’t fly to your computer you know!) :P

Check out how to use Google Gears to enable Offline Gmail

4. Be in contact with your contacts!

Finally, the Gmail Contact Section has improved. Do you have different mail ids of the same person? Add both the emails under one! Just select the email ids & choose “Merge”! You can also easily add people to your “frequently mailed” list & delete contacts from “My Contacts”. Not to forget, it’s now possible to search through the contacts details too (Looking for someone who lives in Bangalore? Look for Bangalore then and it’ll search for all contacts with “Bangalore” in their address!). Here’s more on the changes.

Being in touch with others was never so easy! :D

5. Small features add up to form a more powerful service!

There are plenty of new additions to Gmail since I last posted. You can now add your location to your signature,  attach multiple files at once (and there’s a sweet progress bar too!),  choose your own color scheme for Gmail,  and tweak the title to show “Inbox (21) - Gmail” instead of “Gmail – Inbox (21)”.



Of course, I’ve been talking about new features in Gmail lab for a while now. Do check out the following posts if you haven’t!!
Don't forget to subscribe to get instant updates! :)

So how are you using Gmail’s new features? What all superpowers does YOUR gmail have, eh? :D
Do try these out & let me know your experience!
PS: Just added a "Share" Button so you can share these tips with other. Or Digg/Stumble it! :D

13 comments:

Sameer said...

oooh...some of them are really useful..
and i didn't know of them before..mast!

thankie!

Mike Borozdin said...

Labels are cool. But nothing beats hierarchical folders!

RaSh said...

@Sameer: Heh. I've spent a few hours today re organizing my inbox. Feels so good :D

@Mike: True. I wonder when these guys will add that. But then having multiple labels for a mail does help a bit.

You *can* have hierarchical folders, but that's using 3rd party tools (and most often works only in FF)

Anyway thanks for dropping by! ;)

Utkarsh Sinha said...

I'll have to look into offline gmail.. sounds useful.

I also found friendconnect... from the studentblog you mentioned... Seems good to me. Ever tried using it?

RaSh said...

I'm still not sure how much FriendConnect, FriendFeed and other such services will work. I'll check it out sometime (like I did with Facebook now) :D

brista said...

I really love a Firefox addon for Gmail called DragDropUpload. You just drag your attachment to the Gmail window and it attaches to your email. It was especially useful before Gmail recently added the multiple upload feature, but for me, since I have to email multiple files with nondescript random numerical file names at work, I think it's easier to do the drag and drop from my Windows folders.

RaSh said...

Hey thanks for the tip Brista! Never knew about it!

Though I use Chrome for most of my browsing, I'll surely try this addon!

None said...

You've been added to argee.org's sidebar. You now have approximately 5 days to change your link to deep sarcasm to argee.org.

Or else...

RaSh said...

*Blog Roll Update Initiated*

5 days eh? Cool. :D

Roomy Naqvy said...

Offline Gmail sounds really good. Exceptional feature.

RaSh said...

Very true Roomy Naqvy! Infact with special feature for slower connections, it sure is bridging the gap between the high speed internet and those still stuck with "dial-ups" & other slower connections.

Kamal said...

Its actually great fun to try out the various features in the labs section of Google and the things that u've mentioned in this post are really useful if we spend the time to set it all up..go google yay :D

RaSh said...

Very true Kamal! Many don't know about this because they can't spend those 10 minutes to get these features started. But once they do, it makes things really better (And cooler :D)!

Nice to see that this post was helpful to you! :)

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