New features for Gmail users

Posted by prashant

October 11, 2008

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Gmail Labs has been constantly brewing magic potions in the cauldron for some time now and has come up with some really cool features for Gmail. It consists of a set of add-ons for Gmail users to accessorize their inbox for easier usage. Some important add-ons were reviewed.

Mouse Gestures:
Ever got tired of clicking ‘Next’ to go through all the unread mails! Now, you can use your mouse to navigate through all mails with a simple gesture. It’s cool, simple and very easy to use. Simply hold the right click button and move the mouse left and right to go to previous or next conversations. You can also move the mouse upwards to jump to the inbox view.

Forgotten Attachment Detector:
This is an amazing feature when it comes to frequent mailers! The biggest mail blunder is when users in click send without adding attachments to their emails but mention it in their email text. This feature prevents you from sending messages without the attachments. It reads the email text and reminds you that you have mentioned a file attachment but have not attached the file.

Signature tweaks:
It’s really uncomfortable to see your signature piling up somewhere at the bottom of your reply mails. This feature moves the signature before the quoted text. In addition, you won’t find the hyphens (–) that is appended before the signature.

Custom date formats:
Gmail sees users all over the globe. Date and time format usage varies with different countries. For example India users the 12-hour clock format and DD-MM-YYYY date format but the same changes in US. This feature enables users to change the date and time format irrespective of the language or location from the Settings tab.

Custom keyboard shortcuts:
This is, by far, the best feature ever introduced for Gmail users! It enables a user to change the current keyboard shortcuts. So you can now enjoy Gmail keyboard shortcuts at your own comfort level! Once enabled, you can change keyboard shortcuts by clicking Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts.

You can access all the Gmail Labs features by clicking Settings > Labs.

Once any of the features is enabled, a small green flask icon is added on the top of your screen in mail view which can be later used to access Gmail Labs directly.