Advertisment

5 Superpowers your Gmail should have!

author-image
PCQ Bureau
New Update

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

Advertisment

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 equip your Gmail with some of these!). How about dividing your inbox so that some important labels are visible separately? I'm seriously into filters and labels. I wanted a way to see it all at once. At Gmail, if you ask for it, you get it! Just enable"Multiple Inbox" and start playing around! Oh & you can view mails from multiple accounts arranged nicely! as they say “An image is worth a thousand words”.

In addition to a quick view of my important labels, I also like to keep all my starred and draft messages in separate panels, Alternatively you can configure what you want to see, as well as set the number of messages displayed and the positioning of your panels from the Multiple Inboxes section under Settings. It also allows me to keep my multiple email accounts under a single account browser window and different Panels. Example, some thing like this in Pane 0 “to:name@workemail.com” should work fine for you.

Advertisment

I'm currently using it to show my Facebook/Orkut/Google updates & alerts related mails next to my inbox. Sweet eh..

2. Labeling is now so much fun!

As you know, you can keep your mails in different labels (Everybody's doing it!).

Sure, labels can serve pretty much the same purpose but unlike with folders, messages can have several labels, so if I get an email from a friend about a trip we're taking together, I can add both a "Friends" and a "Travel" label to it.

Advertisment

So the Gmail team has been kind enough to give us two buttons on the top bar to help us easily add, remove labels from mails. So now (3rd Feb 2009 onwards) 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!).

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!

Advertisment

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

Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail. As long as you're connected to the network, that cache is synchronized with Gmail's servers. When you lose your connection, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored on your computer's hard drive instead of the information sent across the network.

Offline Gmail was an experimental feature, Gmail engineer have been using offline Gmail internally at Google for quite a while. Now its ready to have a larger set of people. Try it out.

Advertisment


4. Be in contact with your contacts!

Finally, the Gmail Contact Section has improved and got rid of some of the cruft.

Do you have different email ids of the same person? Add both the emails under one! Just select the email ids & choose “Merge”! Now that you can sync your contacts to a variety of devices, being able to merge contacts is more important than ever. 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.

Advertisment

Looking for someone who lives in Bangalore? Look for Bangalore then and it'll search for all contacts with “Bangalore” in their address!. Instead of just searching contact names and email addresses, it now includes phone numbers, notes fields, and mailing addresses as well.

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

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

Advertisment

There are plenty of new additions to Gmail.

The first question in many messages I receive is "where are you?" and by the time I answer I am often somewhere else. Then you can now add your location to your signature. It'll use your public IP address to determine your location.

Attach multiple files at once from the same folder, simply hold down the Ctrl key (Cmd on OS X) and click on each file you want to attach to your message and there's a sweet progress bar for each attachment too!.

Many people have asked Gmail, not surprisingly, whether they can customize the look of their inboxes without having to use some advanced scripting magic. If you were one of them then you can now choose your own color scheme for Gmail.

Add a tiny new feature to Gmail Labs called Title Tweaks that changes the order of the elements in the browser title bar to put the more important things first. So you can turn on 'tweak the title', to show “Inbox (21) - Gmail” instead of “Gmail — Inbox (21)”. Now keep Gmail minimized or in an inactive tab and see your unread message count as your browser title bar will display something more like "Inbox (3) — Gma...".

Gundeep Bindra  

Advertisment