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10 GMail Labs features worth enabling

10 GMail Labs features worth enabling

by Lee Mathews (RSS feed) Mar 20th 2009 at 11:00AM
The GMail crew has been doing a great job of adding useful features of late -- some of them right into GMail, others in Labs. If you haven't clicked on the little green beaker in the top toolbar yet, there are plenty of excellent features worth turning on. Here are 10 that I find particularly useful.





Offline
Arguably the most powerful feature available in labs right now. Offline access requires the installation of Google Gears, but it's an invaluable option for anyone who needs access to their inbox any time internet access isn't available.

Undo Send
Newly added, the five-second windows is just long enough to evaluate any misgivings you might have or catch the rare but horrendous typo that you didn't notice was underlined.

Media Previews
Apart from the obvious convenience of previewing Flickr and Picasa images and Yelp comments below a message, the YouTube preview is a much less obvious way for you to watch that clip your buddy sent you about the kid that just left the dentist's office.


Send & Archive
Achieving inbox zero Nirvana means archiving items you've already addressed. Turning on this labs feature replaces the usual send button with a one-two punch that simultaneously fires off your reply and archives the conversation.

Google Calendar Gadget
GMail has matured into much more than a webmail app. Enabling the Calendar Gadget provides a quick glimpse at upcoming events as well as a dead simple way to add new ones. The mini calendar view allows you locate past entries in a snap.

Add Any Gadget by URL
There are loads of useful Google Gadgets out there, and this labs feature allows you to access them within GMail. Very handy for users of services like Remember the Milk.

Title Tweaks
If you don't use the Better GMail addon or Greasemonkey, this is an easy way to clean up the page title so it's more useful when you have multiple tabs open. It removes the "GMail - " at the begging and makes seeing your unread count possible even when tabs get squashed.

Date & Time Tweaks
I'm not sure why, but I've grown to prefer using military time. It does save a little bit of space, and, really, counting to 13 after 12 makes more sense. You can also flip the month and day positions, very handy if you're helping a Canadian set up their email and they're curious aboot when someone added 19 new months to the calendar.

Canned Responses
Quite often, I'll fire off a message to a friend's cell phone from GMail, and they're usually pretty much the same thing: "Pick up freight at bus depot." "Get coffee at Tim Hortons on the way back." "You forgot your blackjack and balaclava again." Setting up a canned response makes sending repetitive messages quick and easy.

Custom Keyboard Shortcuts
I don't have a lot of desk surface at work, so I prefer to use my keyboard whenever possible. GMail has built-in support for a large number of shortcuts already, but it's nice to be able to tweak things on my own.

Do you have any labs features enabled on your GMail account? Share your picks in the comments!

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