Here at Make Use Of, we’re big fans of Gmail and use it all the time. We love the interface, the features and above all, It just works.
But, as with all software, there is room for improvement and although Google has been adding features to Gmail at a dizzying pace, there’s only so much they can do, without breaking up the thing for a whole bunch of users.
And that is where Gmail Labs come in. My guess is that the Gmail team at Google got tired of deciding if a feature was good enough to be in Gmail and so have designed Gmail Labs to let the users decide, which is an awesome idea if you ask me!
According to the Gmail team,
Gmail Labs is a way for us to take lots of the ideas we wouldn’t normally pick and let you all (who use Gmail) decide whether they’re good or not.
To enable the Labs features, log-in to your Gmail account and click on “Settings”. There you should see the Labs tab. Click on that for a list of all the available features.
Right Side Labels/Right Side Chat
This is one of my favorite extensions. All it does is take the list of labels and the chat box from the bottom-left of the page and places it at the top-right of the page. What a huge difference that makes.
The problem with the labels/chat box at the default location is that one has to do a bit of scrolling and clicking to reach there. This extension takes the pain out of using the labels.
Signature Tweaks
This is one of those things that has been, in my opinion, broken in Gmail since day one. I’m glad that the team has finally got around to providing a solution to the problem. The signature tweaks extension lets you place your signature before the quoted text when replying to an email. It also removes the ‘–’ before the signature.
Quoted Text
This extension is definite proof that God exists. Gone are the days of selecting and deleting irrelevant text when replying to a message. A huge time-saver if ever there was one.
Vacation Time
This is another useful extension that lets you specify the start and end dates for your vacation, so that the auto-responder can stop auto-responding to emails when you’re back.
Now, I can see that grin on your faces, I know all of you have at some time forgot to disable the auto-responder ;)
Forgotten Attachment Detector
We’re all guilty of forgetting to attach a file while sending an email. Hell, I’ve even sent job applications without attaching my resume :-) This extension is definitely a God-send for people like me … and I use it all the time.
Do you guys have any favourite Gmail Labs extensions ? Are there any extensions you would like Gmail Labs to invent? Please leave a comment and tell us your dream Gmail extension!
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Everyone should use this : http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sending-mail-you-later.html?foo
I know I will be playing around with the custom colors for labels
Great intro to the latest features. Features that I’m looking forward to:
1. Multiple avatars you can assign based on categories you give to people in your address book
2. Multiple signatures (same as above)
3. Reply option that excludes quoted text beyond a certain depth
4. PGP for really private email
Just a few from my wish list.
No point to having PGP on GMail. It auto-saves drafts anyway, so your cleartext version would be saved on their servers. Type & encrypt it locally, as you’ve always done, if you actually want it to be private. Oh, um, save it in /tmp before the encryption, that way it’s just a ramdisk, not your actual hard drive…because you don’t want the cleartext to exist anywhere on any hard drive.
Um, why would you get rid of the “– ” signature marker? That two-dashes-and-a-space is the standard way of marking the start of a signature block so that mail clients know not to quote anything after it, though I guess if you’re being ridiculous and top-posting, that would result in having nothing quoted.
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
Now, that’s not to say you put the *entire* email at the top. That’s not what quoting’s for. You quote the part to which you are replying. Snip out the irrelevant bits.
I found a greasemonkey script that “fixes” gmail to make it work right. It gets rid of the top two lines and moves the cursor to the signature in the right spot. There are a couple of slightly broken ones on userscripts.org, so I fixed one up (I think) and put it here:
http://people.freebsd.org/~peter/gmail_fix_replies.user.js
I use that now and I’m much happier. And it stops me getting yelled at if I forget and accidently top-post on a mailing list.
I want this stuff for the hosted Gmail – Now!
please?
You can get the new features on hosted email by sticking “?ui=2″ at the end of your login url. eg: “mail.google.com/a/yourdomain/?ui=2″. That includes the Labs features.
Peter, if Valentine’s gifts are absent in your life, please let me know. That situation will end immediately.
@Jacob: LOL … I sure can make use of (pun intended ;) ) of this new feature.
@ Aoi: I can definitely use some of those myself. Google are you listening !
Having a mail merge option to send mass emails without having to use thunderbird or otherwise. Could be made to use google docs’ spreadsheet.
Temporary fix for the “Right Side Labels/Right Side Chat” horizontal scrollbar:
When you are logged in to the Chat >> Click the “Options” Link >> Then click anywhere.
That should temporarily fix it.
STOP TOP-QUOTING.
The signature goes at the BOTTOM. Where your REPLY should be.
Pah. You are validating my inherent mistrust of strangers. Mackenzie, besides being cute as a button, has provided the canonical Q & A on this topic.
They need to have one to automatically detect dates, then search for places and times, and then have a pop-up asking if you want to set an event with the sender at that place, time, and date, and let you deny or edit it. That would be incredibly cool.
I discovered this one yesterday… they have a lab item called “Mail Goggles”, which gives you a short test during specified times (which you can set, but there is a default) so that you don’t send regretful emails while your not in your right mind (ie. drunk, high, etc). I think this will help a lot of people.
Excellent list…just rack up another GMail list that just plain ‘makes sense’.
I want a drop down next to “reply” that will have an option to reply using one of the templates that I have saved. I have to reply to a lot of e-mails and I will like to use templates like “general inquiry”, “redressing complaint” etc. I have saved the text in draft folder. But I have to copy-paste it every time when I reply. I hope this will help a lot of people.
Note that the “labs” tab in the gmail settings is not available if the language is not set to English.
Nice article, I’ll check them out.
BTW, you didn’t do a great job blurring your email address, I can still read it when I look from above at my laptop screen
I want to be able to paste pictures in gmail. why can’t we do that? it seems so simple
My wishlist:
1) Paste images into emails
2) Drag&drop attachments
3) Drag&drop emails over a label to “label and archive”
4) Invites
5) Mini-calender linked with the Google-Calender and the option to create events without going to the Calender page
6) ability to open ZIP files without downloading them, and then select the files to unzip/download
7) search into attachments
8) option to save attachments in the Google documents web-space
9) option to select as attachment a Google document
10) to-do lists (with the option of linking important emails for the task)
11) Program email (to be sent automaticaly in 2, 3, 4 days)
12) sms notifications
and so on…
If you want to drag and drop attachments, you can do this at the moment using a Firefox extension called “dragdropupload” – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2190 . I’ve been using it for a long time and it works perfectly. But you’re right – Gmail should have this built in by default.
Invites? To what?
I have a fairly short wishlist when it comes to Gmail as most of my wishes have already been done by Gmail :
1) drag and drop attachments by default
2) a more functional address book (mainly the ability to tick off the people you want to send the email to, instead of trying to remember who’s in your address book)
3) search inside attachments
4) delete attachments but keep the email.
5) a to-do list
6) tighter integration with Google Calendar.
Gud one !!
Karthik Balaguru
Hi Mark, thanks for the recommendation! I will take a look on it, it seems very interesting. When I said “Invites” I was thinking of a better integration with the events of Google Calender: Maybe with a button. If your wish-list gets implemented, then I’ll have to think harder of more suggestions!
I cant get the LABS tab to show up in my gmail account. It doesnt work for any of my gmail/google apps either.
I’ve switched all settings to English UK and turned on next generation features etc
Any ideas?
Nice compilation.
I faced some issues on right side chat/label bar.
When I read the mails, the google ads and these right side bar are clashing. Which is very ugly.
I hope GMail will fix this.
Other then the mass mailing mentioned by myself before, another useful feature would be the ability to disactivate an email without removing/deleting it. i.e. when someone retires and their professional email isn’t valid anymore, I do not want that persons old address to appear when composing an email. But it could be interesting to still have that email for search reasons for example.
@Vijay: Which browser are you using ? I use firefox and safari and the right-side chat works perfectly.
@Munkypint: I agree gmail’s address book is kinda broken in that sense. The ability to “deactivate” an email address is something I’ve wanted for some time too. Hopefully, google is listening :-)
I want to be able to send emails at a specific date & time.
The suggestion from momo could be useful.
My wish would be to group all the conversations from a person or with a tag under the same conversation. Yeah, labels are great, but if you want to keep up to date with the usenet groups, it is much better to have all the new messages inside only one message. Currently, my inbox is overflooded and if i use the option to “label n archive†then i lose track of the new messages.
Some of these are great features that can be used in gmail. But there are a few that I don’t see a real big use for or what anyone would use them for.
I hope I’m not asking a question that is obvious… If so, sorry. I looked around a bit and couldn’t seem to see anything relating…
My issue is that once in a while I want to send an email without my signature block. Other than going into settings and checking “no signature” before I write the email, I can’t find a way to do this.
Any help?
Thanks,
Ron
Ron,
I don’t know of a solution for this other than removing the signature manually for those emails that you don’t want a signature for. You don’t have to go all the way to the settings pane, just delete the signature from the email.
–
Sharninder
I should have also put the relevant point that I often want to do this from my BB, and you can’t even go into settings and uncheck your signature in the smartphone Gmail.
It’d be ideal if you could end your email with a string which would then block the signature from appending on.
Thanks