Be sure to "middle click" on the post links to open them in a new tab. Kids get your mom or dad to approve all the news feeds, some may be PG-13 or higher.
Labels are more flexible than folders because a given email can have several labels but can't be in several folders at the same time. A highly requested feature for labels, though, comes from the world of folders: the ability to organize labels hierarchically.
If you think this might be useful to you, go to the Gmail Labs tab under Settings, look for "Nested Labels," enable it and click "Save." You'll then need to name your label with slashes (/) to make it the child of another. For example, let's say you wanted to create a simple hierarchy with a "Home" label, and inside it a "Family" and a "Vacation" label. Just create three labels with the following names:
Home Home/Family Home/Vacation
You can then create "Home/Family/Kids," "Home/Pets," etc., to get something like the screenshot on the left. If you had the parent label "Home" before you don't have to create it from scratch.
You can create complex hierarchies of labels if that's the way you like to organize your mail, and you can expand/collapse labels to save space. You'll always be able to tell whether a given label contains unread messages in its collapsed child labels by looking at whether it's bold or not.
Please note that this lab doesn't play nicely with the "Hide Read Labels" lab. You might not get exactly what you expect if you have both labs enabled; for example, the collapse/expand icons won't always appear when they should.
Another highly requested feature is the ability to preview messages to get a glimpse on what they contain and maybe take immediate action without opening them.
This is exactly what "Message Sneak Peek" does. After you turn it on, right-clicking on a line in your inbox shows a preview pane with the message in it.
You can also use keyboard shortcuts for a faster sneak-peeking flow (enable keyboard shortcuts in Settings first if you haven't done so): hit 'h' to open a sneak peek card, then navigate with 'j' and 'k,' and dismiss the current card by pressing "Escape." Messages you peak at will stay unread (or it wouldn't really be a sneak peek, would it?).
I subscribe to a lot of really active mailing lists. Oftentimes, an email in my inbox will get dozens of replies before I get a chance to start reading it. If I only have a few moments to look at a particularly long and interesting discussion, I'd like to start reading it then; later, when I have some more time, I'll pick up where I left off. However, if I mark the thread as unread, it will return to its previously read state without updating to show what I just read. When I come back to it, I'll have to search for the last thing I remember reading. If I star the first message I still want to read instead, I might not remember that it needs to be read when I'm in my inbox later (and when I do read it, I'll have to expand lots of messages before I can read the conversation properly).
There's a new feature in Gmail Labs that will help with this. When you enable Mark Unread From Here from the Labs tab under Settings, you'll see a new "Mark unread from here" option in the drop down menu found in the upper right-hand corner of messages.
Clicking this option on a message tells Gmail that you want that message to be the first one you see when you reopen the thread later, with all messages after it open for easy reading. So, when you leave partway through reading a long thread, figuring out where to start reading again is easy. Give it a try and share your thoughts.
Almost a year ago, we launched Offline Gmail in Gmail Labs. By installing Offline Gmail, you're able to use the normal Gmail interface to read and write mail, search, and organize, even when there's no internet connection. And Flaky Connection mode speeds up Gmail when your connection is slow or unreliable.
Since we first launched in Labs, we've heard from a lot of you who tried Offline Gmail, and your feedback helped us make a lot of improvements. Aside from fixing bugs and making the whole offline experience smoother, we recently added two frequently requested features: an option to choose which messages get downloaded for offline use and the ability to send attachments while offline. Offline Gmail has proven particularly useful for business and schools making the switch to Google Apps from traditional desktop mail clients -- they're used to being able to access their mail whether or not they're online, and Offline Gmail brings this functionality right to the browser.
Now, we're happy to announce that Offline Gmail is graduating from Labs and becoming a regular part of Gmail. If you're already using it, then you're all set. While you'll no longer see it on the Labs tab, you can tweak your settings and turn it on and off from the Offline tab under Settings. If you'd like to get started with Offline Gmail on your computer now, here's how:
Click the "Settings" link in the top-right corner of Gmail.
Click the "Offline" tab.
Select "Enable Offline Mail for this computer."
Click "Save Changes" and follow the directions from there.
Thanks for all of the feedback over the last year -- and for putting up with the occasional bug or two. We're going to have a little toast, and then get right back to working on more improvements for 2010.
P.S. We received some interesting pictures in response to our call for photos of people using Gmail offline in our last post. Our favorite so far came from Ugo, who is at a Saharawi refugee camp in south Algeria, where he uses Gmail offline most of the time and connects via a satellite phone to our servers just once a day.
Posted by Darren Lewis, Software Engineer and Jon Kotker, former Software Engineering Intern
In the early days of email, messages were simple text meant to be read on a terminal. But with the growth of the web came the advent of HTML email, and overnight people began expressing themselves through bold and italics, colors and images, and whatever else their creativity inspired.
If you like to use a specific text style for your messages, you've had to change the font every time you're about to start typing out an email. Now, you can turn on default text styling from the Labs tab, then go to Settings and set your preferences just once.
Try it out and tell us what you think. If you live and breathe code, now you can set your default text style to a monospace font. If your life is purple, your email can be, too. But remember: whatever you see is what your recipients will see, so be nice to them and try not to clog the intertubes with ginormous bold italicized red script. ;)
One of the most requested features for Offline Gmail has been the ability to include attachments in messages composed while offline. Starting today, attachments work just the way you would expect them to whether you are online or offline (with the exception that when you're offline you won't be able to include inline images). Just add the attachment and send your message.
If you have Offline Gmail enabled, you'll notice that all your mail now goes through the outbox, regardless of whether you're online or offline. This allows Gmail to capture all attachments, even if you suddenly get disconnected from network. If you're online, your mail will quickly be sent along to its destination.
If you haven't tried offline access yet, visit the Labs tab and follow these instructions to get started:
Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
Click Save Changes.
After your browser reloads, you'll see a new "Offline" link in the upper righthand corner of the Gmail page, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don't already have it.
Now that you can send attachments while offline, we'd love to see pictures of you using Gmail in unusual places while you're disconnected from the web. Pictures of you using Gmail in an airplane, igloo, or submarine are all welcome. Email your photo to hikingfan@gmail.com and we'll post the most interesting ones here.
Gmail chat status (those green, orange, and red bubbles) indicates if your friends are online or not. But sometimes my buddies appear green when they're not really "online online" — they just have chat open on their Android phones.
Turn on Green Robot, a new experiment in Gmail Labs, and you'll see a robot icon next to people who are currently using Android phones. In the case below, Shirley is online with Android, Nicolle R. is using regular Gmail chat, and Chris I. is currently away but also on Android. Slatka is not an angry robot — she's online with Android but currently busy.
These icons can help you decide whether to tailor your conversation to the type of device that your chat buddy is using. For example, when you know the guy on the other end is using his Android phone, you may decide to send shorter, more concise chat messages.
When your chat buddies log into Gmail, their presence icons will revert to the traditional red, green, and orange status bubbles. In addition, if your chat buddy happens to be logged into both Gmail and Android chat then the traditional Gmail status icons will be shown. Try it out and let us know what you think.
Like an increasing number of people these days, I like to stay productive during my flights (even those without wifi access). A long flight is a perfect opportunity to go through everything in my inbox and catch up on older mail. I use Offline Gmail in Gmail Labs to access my mail while disconnected. However, up until now, Offline Gmail heuristically picked which messages get downloaded for offline use. This meant that sometimes not enough mail from my Inbox would be available, but the Chat logs that I certainly didn't need on the flight would be there.
From now on, once you enable Offline Gmail from the Labs tab under Settings, you can choose which messages get downloaded. On the Offline tab under Settings, you'll see your current settings and be able to set how much mail you want to download from each of your labels. I chose to download everything in my Inbox and important labels, as well as recent messages from the last month from other labels.
When you hit save, Gmail will synchronize new messages you didn't have downloaded before and remove the ones you're not planning to read from your hard drive. You can always change your settings back to keep fewer or more messages later on -- fewer messages means Offline Gmail runs faster. Questions or comments? Let us know!
Being an avid Google Docs user, I receive a ton of emails with links to documents that my co-workers and friends share with me. From technical design documents at work to my roommate's expenses spreadsheet, my inbox is full of document links that I need to view as I reply to my mail.
Opening these links in another tab or window is kind of annoying, plus it can be tough to keep the context of the email in mind while viewing the document.
Starting today, you can preview the contents of a Google document, spreadsheet, or presentation right in your Gmail inbox — just like you've already been able to do with YouTube videos, Yelp reviews, and Picasa and Flickr albums. Gmail will automatically detect when you receive a document link and display the name and type of doc below the email.
Just click "Show preview" and the contents of the document will display right there — no need to switch back and forth between email response and document.
To enable Google Docs previews, go to the Labs tab under Settings. Let us know what you think and what else you'd like to see while viewing docs in Gmail.
Posted by Ari Leichtberg, Software Engineer and Yossi Matias, Head of Israel Engineering Center
When's the last time you got an email from a stranger asking, "Are you sure you meant to send this to me?" and promptly realized that you didn't? Sometimes these little mistakes are actually quite painful. Hate mail about your boss to your boss? Personal info to some random guy named Bob instead of Bob the HR rep? Doh!
"Got the wrong Bob?" is a new Labs feature aimed at sparing you this kind of embarrassment. Turn it on from the Labs tab under Gmail Settings, and based on the groups of people you email most often, Gmail will try to identify when you've accidentally included the wrong person — before it's too late.
If you normally email Bob Smith together with Tim and Angela, but this time you added Bob Jones instead, we'll warn you that it might be a mistake. Note that this only works if you're emailing more than two people at once.
While we were at it, we also changed the name of "Suggest more recipients" to "Don't forget Bob" — the two related Labs features just kind of went together better this way.
If you want to test "Got the wrong Bob?" out, try faking a mistake like this: 1) Think of three people you often email together. 2) Compose a message to two of them. 3) Start typing the third member of the group (for help you can use one of the people we suggest in "Don't forget Bob"), but then auto-complete on the wrong name.
If you have suggestions please let us know. And if "Got the wrong Bob?" happens to save you from making a really bad mistake, we want to hear about that too.
A lot of people want to see their labels in order to see which ones have unread messages, but they don't want a long list of label names cluttering up the left hand side of their inboxes. To help out with this, we've made a Gmail Labs feature called "Hide read labels." Turn it on from the Labs tab under Settings and all your labels without unread messages will be hidden under the "More" menu. Labels with unread messages will automatically show up, unless you've explicitly chosen to keep them hidden.
This is particularly handy if you use your inbox as a to-do list where unread messages are the outstanding things you need to take care of. If you use that method along with labels like "Home" and "Project X," it's easy to see all your to-dos in context. With this Labs feature on, labels with outstanding to-dos will be bold and have a number next to them; everything else will be hidden in the "11 more" section:
Posted by Vincent Paquet, Google Voice Product Manager
Google Voice helps you manage your communications with a unique phone number that rings all your existing phones, a single voicemail inbox with online access and automated transcription, and lots of handy features like the ability to block spammy calls and easily record personalized greetings for your callers. Think of it as Gmail for your phone calls and text messages (watch this video to learn more). Google Voice is currently available via invitation, which you can request here.
For those of you who already use Google Voice, you're probably used to receiving voicemail notifications via email. A couple of minutes after someone leaves a voicemail on your Google Voice number, you'll receive an email showing who called, an automated transcript of the voicemail, and a link to play the message. You can click the link to listen to the message right from your computer.
Previously, clicking "Play message" opened a new page in your browser, but starting today, you can play voicemails right in Gmail. Just turn on the Google Voice player from the Gmail Labs tab under Settings and whenever you get a voicemail notification, the player will appear right below the message itself.
Best of all, your message status will stay synced: messages played from Gmail will appear as read in your Google Voice inbox and won't be played again when you check new messages via your phone. If you already use Google Voice, try it out and let us know what you think. If you don't have a Google Voice account yet, sign up for an invitation and we'll get you one ASAP.
Some time ago I bought a netbook. It's perfect in terms of portability, weight and space usage, but the natural drawback is the size of the screen. It's so small that sometimes I find it hard to read the subjects of emails in my inbox. It looks something like this:
Now, there are some ways to work around this, like using Google Chrome's full screen mode, but I wanted a way to do more. So I created a new Gmail Labs feature called "Remove Labels from Subjects" that automatically hides the labels from messages in your inbox, leaving plenty of space for the messages' subjects.
We launched Gmail Labs as a forum for delivering useful (and maybe not so useful) features that might not be quite ready for prime time. The idea was always that the most popular and viable Labs features would graduate and be made more readily available to all users...and that some of the less used, less viable ones would disappear forever.
I'm proud to announce that Tasks is in that first bucket — it's been one of the most popular experimental Gmail features and it's now the first graduate from Labs.
To access Tasks, starting today you can just click "Tasks" under the "Contacts" link above your chat list (no need to turn it on from the Labs tab anymore).
Rest assured there's more on the way for Tasks— just because we're graduating from Labs today doesn't mean we're done.
We've received a lot of positive feedback about Gmail Labs, and we've found that testing something in Labs can be a good way to help decide whether it should become a regular part of Gmail. So we decided to extend the same model to Google Calendar. Beginning today, you can add Labs features to your calendar too, such as Free or Busy, which lets you see which of your friends or coworkers are currently in meetings or World Clock, which helps you keep track of different timezones when you schedule meetings. Take a look at the Google Apps blog for more info.
Whenever I open up my inbox at work, I'm never surprised to find several new messages waiting to be read. The same thing can't always be said about my personal Gmail account. Sometimes I end up checking my mail only to find nothing new there.
No big deal, really. But now imagine that you access Gmail on a super slow connection from a remote place in Ethopia where it might take minutes to completely load your inbox. The disappointment is larger when you find out that there is nothing new to read and you could have saved all that time.
To ease this pain a bit, we created a new feature in Gmail Labs called Inbox Preview. While Gmail is loading, a simple, static preview of your inbox with your ten most recent messages is displayed. Turn it on from the Labs tab under Settings, and if you're on a slow connection you'll know from the start if it's worth the wait.
Back in the early days of human existence, before language had fully developed, our caveman ancestors probably did a lot of grunting. Language, and thus life, were pretty simple: watch out for that saber-toothed tiger ("Blorg! AIYA!!!"); stop riding the wooly mammoth and help me pick some berries ("Argh. Zagle zorg!"); man, it's cold in this Ice Age ("Brrrr.").
Somewhere along the line, all those grunts diverged into thousands of distinct languages, and life became both richer and more complicated. And for the last few eons or so, we've struggled to communicate in a multilingual world. Which brings us to today. Since the heart and soul of Gmail is about helping people communicate, I'm proud to announce the integration of Google's automatic translation technology directly into Gmail.
Simply enable "Message Translation" from the Labs tab under Settings, and when you receive an email in a language other than your own, Gmail will help you translate it into a language you can understand. In one click.
If all parties are using Gmail, you can have entire conversations in multiple languages with each participant reading the messages in whatever language is most comfortable for them. It's not quite the universal translators we're so fond of from science fiction, but thanks to Google Translate, it's an exciting step in the right direction. I use this feature everyday to help me work with teammates around the globe (they think my Japanese is much better than it really is...shhhh!).
Whether you're reading a family update from inlaws on the other side of the world, working with a multinational team, or just trying to bring about world peace, don't worry, Gmail's got your back.
I used to have a problem. People would ask me questions, over chat or email, and I'd have to leave Gmail to search Google for an answer. Then I'd have to select the answer, copy it, go back to Gmail and paste the answer into the chat window or my reply. Sometimes I'd get distracted and forget to go back to Gmail, and I'd have to go through it all again when I remembered what I'd been doing.
With the new Google Search experiment in Gmail Labs, my problem is solved. When you turn this feature on from the Labs tab under Settings, you'll see a new search box on the left side of your inbox, like this:
Type your search in, and a window (like a chat window, but a bit bigger) appears at the bottom of your screen with the first few search results.
You can click on a search result and it'll open up in another window (or another tab) so you can make sure it's what you're looking for. Once you're sure it's a result you need, moving your mouse over the result back in Gmail reveals a pull-down menu that lets you do stuff with the search result.
What's in the menu depends on what you're doing in Gmail:
If you're reading a message, you can start a reply to the message with the search result as the first thing in your reply.
If you're writing a message, you can paste the result, or just the URL into your message.
If you're chatting with someone, you can send the result via chat.
You can also always compose a new message to send the search result.
If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, typing g and then / will take you to the search box when you're not composing, and Ctrl + g will do it when you're composing (that's ⌘ + g for Mac users).
Like all things in Gmail Labs, we're going to be tinkering with it, so let us know what you think.
Oh, and one other thing: with all the stuff we've been adding to Gmail Labs lately, the left side of your account might be getting crowded. A lot of the people who've been playing with this new feature have found it useful to turn on "Navbar drag and drop" in Labs so they can move the web search box up to the top where it's easy to get to.
For a short period of time after launching emoticons for mail, we believed we had successfully captured the entirety of human expression in 19 faces (we're still debating whether the robot face counts), important representatives of the animal kingdom such as and , emoticons for both love () and heartbreak (), and, well, a pile of .
But soon a growing feeling of dread overcame the group . How could we have included a but not a cat? What if I want wine rather than ?
And thus was born a new Labs feature: extra emoji, the colorfully animated brainchild of our team in Japan. Simply go to the Labs tab under Settings, enable "Extra Emoji," and have that glass of you've been dreaming about. Ask your in-laws about the fluffiness factor of their pet . Become a meteorologist and start predicting . Dance like you mean it . Then let us know what you think.
(If you're wondering how we had time to create another couple hundred emoticons when we're busy doing important stuff like rewriting Gmail for mobile and making Gmail work offline, the answer is: we didn't. All of these extra emoticons are straight from the secret underground labs of some of the top Japanese mobile carriers, used with permission. Thanks guys!)
Have you ever realized you mistakenly left someone important out of an email, or just spent too much time trying to decide who from your long list of contacts to include? Well, some of us on the Gmail team feel your pain, so we wrote a new Gmail Labs feature called "Suggest more recipients."
Once you've enabled it from the Labs tab under Settings, you'll see suggested recipients while composing messages. Gmail will suggest people you might want to include based on the groups of people you email most often. So if you always email your mom, dad, and sister together, and you start composing a message to your mom and dad, Gmail will suggest adding your sister. Enter at least two recipients and any suggestions will show up like this:
Click on a suggested name, and they'll get added to your email.
Hopefully having lots of friends and co-workers just got a bit less onerous for you. (Oh, the burden of popularity!) Enjoy, and as usual, please let us know what you think.
Well, it's about time. You no longer have to use workarounds to put images into your messages or attach images when you really want to inline them. Just turn on "Inserting images" from the Labs tab under Settings, and you'll see a new toolbar icon like this:
Make sure you're in rich formatting mode, or it won't show up. Click the little image icon, and you can insert images in two ways: by uploading image files from your computer or providing image URLs.
Keep in mind that Gmail doesn't show URL-based images in messages by default to protect you from spammers, so if you're sending mail to other Gmail users, they'll still have to click "Display images below" or "Always display images from ..." to see images you embed.
Let's say your girlfriend sends you an angry email. It's mostly about how you behaved at the party last night and then left for a business trip without saying goodbye. You read it from the other side of the globe, jet-lagged after a 12 hour flight. You want to call and sort things out, but forget that it's now almost 3:00 am her time. After waking her up, things only get worse.
There's a new feature in Gmail Labs called Sender Time Zone that can help. Turn it on from the Labs tab under Settings, and you'll see green phone icons next to people who are probably awake and readily reachable (if it's between 9:00 am and 6:00 pm in the sender's local time zone) and red ones next to those who could be sleeping or out of the office:
Click "show details" and you can see when a message was sent in the sender's time zone as well as what time it is for them now:
Message headers always include the time sent and often include time zone info too. We use that information to show you these icons. If the time zone isn't included for a given message, this Labs feature won't display anything. Try it out and tell us what you think.
On the Gmail team, we believe finding the right email among thousands of messages can be as important as finding the right web page across the billions of web pages out there. So with the aim of making search in Gmail easier, we built a new experimental feature in Gmail Labs: Search Autocomplete.
Turn on Search Autocomplete from the Labs tab under Gmail Settings, and you'll get suggestions as you type in the search box. One of the most popular searches in Gmail is for names or email addresses, so the first kind of suggestions you'll see are contacts. Some names are not easy to remember (my last name is an excellent example!) — with this new Labs feature you can just type a couple letters and select the desired contact from the drop down list. Easy and quick as that.
Gmail also offers a bunch of advanced search operators, which provide a powerful way to find that one message you have in mind. You can search in specific places (e.g. in chats or sent items), or search for messages with attachments of a certain type (e.g. docs or photos). Suppose I want to search for photos that were sent to me by my friend Chris. Normally, I would have to enter Chris' email address followed by filename:(jpg OR png), which I gladly admit is even a bit too geeky for me. With Search Autocomplete, I can just type "photos" or "pictures," select "has photos" from the drop down list (as in the screenshot below), and the search query (filename:(jpg OR png)) gets inserted for me. Similarly, you can type in the word "attachment" and Search Autocomplete will list the most common attachment types for you.
One of the reasons we still show you the geeky search query is to allow you to adapt it to your needs. For example, if you'd like to include tiff files in your search result, you can adapt the query manually to filename:(jpg OR png OR tiff).
That's it for now. Play around and make sure to use the time that you save on searching to let us know what you think.
This post comes to you from our team in Switzerland, a small country with no fewer than four official languages and many more spoken by people living here. The majority of Gmail users are outside the U.S., so it's no surprise that since we launched Gmail Labs last year, people around the world have been asking for these experimental features in their local languages. As of today, we're making Gmail Labs available internationally.
You may wonder, since most Gmail features are available in almost every supported language immediately at launch, why Labs hasn't been. The truth is that Labs itself is a bit of an experiment -- it came out of people's 20% time, and we weren't sure if it would really work. Specifically, we thought there was a chance that everything would just break. Every time a Gmail user signs in we create a custom version of JavaScript for them based on the Labs features they have enabled. Since we have 43 Labs right now, there are 243 (~8 trillion) possible versions of the Gmail JavaScript that a user could get. If you account for the 49 languages where Labs are now available, it gets even bigger -- 49 x 243 (~430 trillion) versions. It would obviously be a challenge to actually test all of these versions. But we put a lot of effort into building an architecture that supports this type of modularity, and fortunately, it seems to be working pretty well so far. So we figured, why not, what's another another 422 trillion permutations?
If your language is set to, say, Italian, you'll see a new page in Settings (or Impostazioni) called Labs. There, you'll find a list of experimental features you can choose to turn on -- everything from the useful (like offline access), to the arcane (like filter import/export), to the slightly ridiculous (like mail goggles). Most of these are translated to work in all of Gmail's supported languages except Hebrew, Arabic, and Urdu. Keep in mind that all Labs features are early experiments -- no design reviews, no product analysis, and not that much testing -- so they may occasionally break. If you run into problems with your account after turning them on, try this escape hatch.
Posted by Michael Leggett, User Experience Designer
Sometimes I regret sending a message the morning after. Other times I send a message and then immediately notice a mistake. I forget to attach a file or email the birthday girl that I can't make her surprise party. I can rush to close my browser or unplug the Internet — but Gmail almost always wins that race.
An email to the wrong Larry pushed me over the edge. I could undo just about any other action in Gmail — why couldn’t I undo send? Many people agreed, including Yuzo Fujishima, an engineer in the Tokyo office. My theory (which others shared) was that even just five seconds would be enough time to catch most of those regrettable emails.
And now you can do just that. Turn on Undo Send in Gmail Labs under Settings, and you’ll see a new “Undo” link on every sent mail confirmation. Click “Undo,” and we’ll grab the message before it’s sent and take you right back to compose.
This feature can't pull back an email that's already gone; it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. And don't worry – if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, we'll still send your message.
I've had Undo Send turned on for a while and it's saved me several times. Let us know if it saves you too.
My email is full of links: my friends send around YouTube videos to try and get a laugh, we share Picasa and Flickr albums with photos from last weekend's camping trip, and we email around the Yelp reviews of restaurants we're considering going to next Friday night.
The truth is, I'm pretty lazy. That's why I like YouTube previews in Gmail chat -- why open a new tab when I can watch the video my friend sent me right there? Gmail currently automatically detects package tracking information, addresses, and event information and shows quick links to delivery status, maps and directions, and Google Calendar. So why couldn't Gmail automatically detect links in emails and show videos, photos, and ratings right inside these messages as well?
We built some new Gmail Labs features that do just that. For our first set, we picked stuff that often shows up in email: YouTube videos, Picasa and Flickr links, and Yelp reviews. Turn on Picasa previews from the Labs tab under Settings, and rather than having to click on a Picasa album link to see the photos it contains, you can see photos right in the message itself:
Same for Flickr:
Enable Youtube previews, and you can watch YouTube videos from inside your email:
And whenever you receive a Yelp link in an email, Yelp previews show you ratings, phone numbers, and other listing information right there:
Give them a try and send us your thoughts. If you work on a product that would lend itself to a great preview in Gmail, we'd love to hear from you too.
Sometimes, in a frenzy of productivity, I'll create a bunch of tasks on my main list. Later on, when it's time to start prioritizing, I'll realize that some of those tasks make more sense on another list (GTDers, take note!). But until now I wasn't able to move all of those tasks without tediously re-entering them.
Now you can easily move a task (and all of its sub-tasks) to another list. To do this, simply click on the arrow (or use Shift-Enter) to the right of the task. At the bottom of this screen is a drop-down with all of your task lists. Simply select another list, and leave the screen by clicking "Back to list."
Poof! Your task will magically migrate to the other list. To convince yourself it's still there, visit the other list in the list switch pop-up.
Another new feature should help with those times when you write what's really two tasks as a single task. Or maybe you hit Enter a little too quickly and continued typing something in a new task that was meant for the previous one.
Now, you can split a single task into two tasks or merge two existing tasks. If you've ever used a word processor, you already know how to do this. Simply use Enter and Backspace as you would normally.
If you're not already using Tasks, turn it on from the Labs tab under your Gmail Settings. Once you do, you'll see the "Tasks" link right near your Contacts. Just click it to get started. We're working on a number of small tweaks like this to make Tasks more useful, so let us know what else you'd like to see.
Posted by Luke Blanshard, Software Engineer and member of the Data Liberation team
Filtering is an essential Gmail power-user feature. With filters (and labels) you can use Gmail to handle a ton of incoming mail. I know — I'm subscribed to 64 mailing lists at Google. My filters let me manage the deluge with ease.
But managing the filters themselves has been another story. Each filter has to be crafted individually — though the ability to "filter messages like these" (see "More actions" while reading a message) does simplify the most common case a great deal.
Filter import/export, available today in Gmail Labs, helps you work with filters in bulk, rather than just one at a time. The basic function is simple: turn it on from the Labs tab under Settings, and from the Settings > Filters page you can download a file containing some or all of your filters or upload a file to create a set of filters all in one go.
Here are some other ideas for things you can do by importing and/or exporting your filters:
Download all your filters. If you're using POP or IMAP to get backup copies of your mail messages, now you can include your filters too.
Share filters with other people. If you have a set of filters that is especially good at organizing particular kinds of mail that others also receive, you can now make those filters available to them.
Temporarily "disable" a set of filters by exporting them and then deleting them. To "reenable" them, just re-import them from the file you exported.
If you're comfortable editing XML, you can make new filters that are similar to existing filters. Export the old ones, edit the resulting XML file, and import it back again. For more information about modifying these XML files, see Gmail Labs user group for Filter import/export.
If you think this might be useful to you, go to the Gmail Labs tab under Settings, look for "Nested Labels," enable it and click "Save." You'll then need to name your label with slashes (/) to make it the child of another. For example, let's say you wanted to create a simple hierarchy with a "Home" label, and inside it a "Family" and a "Vacation" label. Just create three labels with the following names: 
This is exactly what "Message Sneak Peek" does. After you turn it on, right-clicking on a line in your inbox shows a preview pane with the message in it.
