There's nothing negative we can say about Gmail--after all, our personal lives thrive on it. Fortunately, there are some experimental labs projects that keep our Inbox organized and require fewer mouse-clicks to sift through a day's messages.
Navigating Picasa and Flickr on an already limited 24-hour day can sometimes be a hassle. By enabling the previews of Flickr and Picasa links in mail, you can skip the step of navigating to a separate link in your browser, and simply view them in your Gmail inbox.
Some of us on staff really appreciate our Google Voice numbers and the voicemail transcription. However, sometimes the transcriber can't understand what the other person is saying, so it's up to you to unearth the mystery behind that voice message. Do so with the click of a button by enabling the Google Voice player in Mail.
When work matters get sent to your personal account, the Google Docs previews in mail can quickly conjure up a snapshot of documents, spreadsheets and presentations directly in your inbox. You can also open either in mail or in a separate Google Docs window.
When Gmail becomes infiltrated with columns of sidebars and gigabytes of messages, quick links can help sift through the clutter by adding a box to the left column that gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You can use it to save frequent search terms, important messages, saved messages with certain labels, and more.
We use Gmail to basically manage our lives, so naturally we suggest that any other power user out there enable both mouse gestures and custom keyboard shortcuts to make it easier on your fingers. The custom keyboard shortcuts can be set from an extra Settings tab in your Gmail.
Calling someone in New York City when it is 8 pm in California is not a good idea--ask any of this writer's East Coast friends. Enable Gmail's Sender Time Zone to make sure your friend on the other side of the coast doesn't miss out on beauty sleep because you didn't know that NYC is three hours ahead.
One column isn't always enough to see all of your important mall messages. For that reason, Multiple Inboxes adds extra lists of emails in your inbox so you can see a few threads at a time, including starred messages, drafts, and any search terms.
One great way to rid of that Gmail clutter is by backing up and exporting your inbox messages to a folder on your hard drive. And, when you need to access an older message, simply import it back. This option becomes available to you under Settings after you enable it.
Not only is Gmail's spam blocker absolutely supreme, but it's also got a nifty authentication service that verifies the sender of the email. This way, you know if it's really PayPal or eBay emailing you (as, currently, these are the only services it officially verifies).
In the heat of the moment, we can say things in our emails that we may regret typing a few seconds later. Thankfully, this Google gadget stops messages from being sent a few seconds after you hit the "Send" button. But act fast, because it only takes less than a minute for your email to reach that other person.
Typing out individual responses for a multitude of different email addresses can be quite a time commitment. With canned responses, you can simply drop in the same few paragraphs for any number of emails. This feature is great if you're sending out the same queries for something like online classifieds, or tired of whipping up the same templates for a very specified email message.
We love sending these cute little emote icons to our friends from our iPhones, so naturally we felt inclined to go full circle by dropping them into our email messages. There's even an Extra Emoji extension that gives you an even richer set of characters and icons to choose from.
Poor Bob. He always seems to be left out of the loop. But, Google Labs has an extension that will suggest Bob on your next email forward, so he'll never miss another important email message.
Conversely, there are some email messages that the one particular Bob really shouldn't see. In this instance, this Gmail extension will make sure to ask if you meant to include Bob This or Bob That, so either Bobs get the right message sent to them.
