Gmail Blog

Tip: Sending empty messages

2008-10-15T15:01:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jon Kotker, Gmail engineering intern, Summer 2008

I often send messages where the subject is the entire message (e.g. "Want to grab lunch at 12:30?"), and Gmail would always prompt me to add in body text.

Now, however, you can add "EOM" or "(EOM)" at the end of the subject line (short for End Of Message), and Gmail will silently send the message without the unnecessary prompt.

New in Labs: Advanced IMAP Controls

2008-10-09T16:38:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jamie Nicolson, Gmail engineer

From the team that brought you Mail Goggles, here comes...Advanced IMAP Controls, a Labs feature that lets you fine-tune your Gmail IMAP experience. You can choose which labels to sync in IMAP -- useful if you find your mail client choking on a big [Gmail]/All Mail folder.

After enabling this Lab, just go to the Labels tab under Settings. You'll see a new 'Show in IMAP' checkbox next to each of your labels. Uncheck the box and the corresponding folder will disappear from IMAP.

There are also some more obscure options for those of you who want to make Gmail's IMAP work more like traditional IMAP providers: you can turn off auto-expunge or trash messages when they're no longer visible through IMAP.

The IMAP protocol allows messages to be marked for deletion, a sort of limbo state where a message is still present in the folder but slated to be deleted the next time the folder is expunged. In our standard IMAP implementation, when you mark a message as deleted, Gmail doesn't let it linger in that state -- it deletes (or auto-expunges) it from the folder right away. If you want the two-stage delete process, after you've enabled this Lab, just select 'Do not automatically expunge messages' under the 'Forwarding and POP/IMAP' tab in Settings.

Similarly, most IMAP systems don't share Gmail's concept of archiving messages (sending messages to the [Gmail]/All Mail folder rather than [Gmail]/Trash). If you'd prefer that deleted messages not remaining in any other visible IMAP folders are sent to [Gmail]/Trash instead, Advanced IMAP Controls lets you set your preferences this way. In the 'IMAP Access:' section of the 'Forwarding and POP/IMAP' tab, find the 'When a message is deleted from the last visible IMAP folder:' option. Select 'Move the message to the Gmail Trash.' If you want to take it one step further, you can select 'Immediately delete the message forever.'

New in Labs: Stop sending mail you later regret

2008-10-06T18:25:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jon Perlow, Gmail engineer

Sometimes I send messages I shouldn't send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together. Gmail can't always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we're launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help.

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?

By default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as that is the time you're most likely to need it. Once enabled, you can adjust when it's active in the General settings.

Hopefully Mail Goggles will prevent many of you out there from sending messages you wish you hadn't. Like that late night memo -- I mean mission statement -- to the entire firm.

Tip: Read your mail without touching your mouse

2008-10-02T15:23:00.001-07:00

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Gmail Product Marketing Manager

First, if you don't have Gmail keyboard shortcuts enabled, turn them on in Settings. You'll be glad you did. If you spend a lot of time in Gmail, you'll start shaving milliseconds of every action, which adds up. Get through a hundred or so messages every day and you'll end up with extra minutes each week to read your favorite blogs in Reader -- using Reader's keyboard shortcuts of course.

Here's how I read my mail:

1. Log in.
If I'm on my own computer I don't even have to do this, since I have the "Remember me on this computer" option checked on the Gmail homepage.

2. Get rid of stuff I obviously don't need to read.
I scan the senders and subjects of unread messages in my inbox, navigate through the messages using k to move the cursor (little black triangle) upwards and j to move it back down.

As I'm moving around, I select all of the messages I haven't already filtered but don't need to read using x.

And archive them all with y (e works for this too). Now I just have the messages I should read.

3. Get through the mail I do need to read.
I find a message that looks important or interesting, and open it using the enter key. If I need to reply, I hit r. Reply all? That's a. Once my response is ready to go, tab + enter sends it on its way. Back to my inbox with g + i. More navigating around with j and k, selecting with enter. Archiving (y) and replying (r). Starring some stuff for later (s). The occasional forward (f). Sending with tab + enter.

It may seem like a lot to remember, but for me, these eleven shortcuts have been invaluable and aside from j and k, which I just had to practice, pretty intuitive (g + i? that's for "goto inbox"). If you ever need a quick refresher, hit ? anytime to see the shortcut reference guide. And if you don't like any of them, you can edit the defaults and define your own by enabling Custom keyboard shortcuts in Labs.

New in Labs: Right-side Labels and Chat

2008-09-17T15:04:00.000-07:00

Posted by Emily Chang, Gmail engineer

As a Google engineer, I get a 24-inch widescreen monitor and a huge amount of email. I built a Labs feature to use the former to mitigate the latter.

In my work email, I have painfully long lists in both Labels and Chat, so I used to scroll constantly in order to see my Labels. Now, with Right-side Labels enabled, I can see both my Labels and my Chat buddies at the same time, with one on the left and one on the right. (This is where that widescreen comes in handy.) Some of my coworkers preferred to move Chat instead of Labels, so I made that an option as well.

FYI: these Labs aren't currently compatible with the "Navbar drag and drop" Lab that allows you to drag and rearrange Chat and Labels on the left side.

New in Labs: Forgotten attachment detector

2008-09-15T17:19:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jon Kotker, Gmail engineering intern, Summer 2008

I spent this last summer as many of the Gmail engineers do, armed with a cup of coffee or a can of soda, poring through lines of code, winding my way through the code base, and every once in a while taking a glance at the big whiteboard of feature ideas that the team maintains. When I had some spare time on my hands, I picked up a few of the ideas from that list and got started turning them into Labs features.

The first one I worked on was something we had been experimenting with a few years ago here inside Google but had never launched -- a Forgotten Attachment Detector. Many of us have experienced the embarrassment of having sent a message without attaching the file we said we were going to attach. Turn on the Forgotten Attachment Detector in Labs, and you'll get an alert if you mention attaching a file but forget to do so.

My fellow intern Mark (the same guy who brought you Custom Label Colors) wrote this next one: the Mark as Read button. If you're tired of digging into the "More actions" menu every time you want to mark unread messages as read, just turn on this Labs feature to add a "Mark as read" button to the top of your inbox.

My summer on the Gmail team is over, and I'm back in school at Berkeley. That means I'm also back to being an avid Gmail user rather than one of its developers, but I remain ever excited about all of the new Gmail features -- both Labs and non-Labs -- that were in development while I was interning, and that we'll soon all be able to use.

New in Labs: Reply add-ons

2008-09-11T12:11:00.000-07:00

Posted by Darick Tong, Gmail engineer

We Gmail developers are arguably among the most demanding of Gmail's users. So in addition to the feedback we get from all of you, a lot of the ideas for new features come from our own frustrations and experiences. We send and receive a lot of mail, and we've already started using these Labs features to make replying that much better.

Quote selected text, by Ryan A
Gmail makes it easy to manage long conversations or threads by hiding the text you've seen before. Unfortunately, this means that the people you're communicating with that aren't using Gmail sometimes get annoyed with you for leaving 25 pages of irrelevant conversation in the email. Also, sometimes you just want to reply to one small part of a conversation. Deleting lots of irrelevant text is rather annoying, so this Labs feature should make your life easier. Just highlight the text you want to include in your reply, hit the keyboard shortcut "r" to reply, and the compose template will be just what you selected! Note: This doesn't quite work in Chrome or Safari yet, but it will in a few weeks.

Default 'Reply to all,' by Mark K
When we're working on features for Gmail, the email etiquette on the team is to reply all so everyone involved is kept in the loop. Mark was an intern here this past summer who got frustrated when he'd reply to an email only to realize that he forgot to reply all and had to resend the message. Thus, this Labs feature, which makes reply all your default selection.

Vacation time, by Darick T
While planning my own vacation, I didn't want to worry about composing, starting and stopping my vacation auto-response while I was on vacation. Call me a purist, but that defeats the whole point of being on vacation! So, to make my vacation that much sweeter, I used a bit of my 20% time and whipped up Vacation Time, which lets you compose and schedule your vacation autoresponse while you're planning your vacation, rather than while you're on vacation. And scheduling is as easy as it is in Google Calendar.

So go on, try it, and have a great vacation.

New in Labs: 3 experiments with labels

2008-09-09T18:25:00.000-07:00

Posted by Keith Coleman, Gmail Product Manager

Since launching our first batch of 13 Gmail Labs features, we've received a lot of suggestions for more experimental features you'd like to see -- plus, we've had some of our own ideas. Today, there's a new batch of labs features to play with. If you like using Labels, we hope you like these.

Custom label colors, by Mark K

If the 24 standard color choices aren't your thing, enable this feature to create your own custom color combinations. Instead of choosing one of the standard colors from the label drop-down menu, click "Add custom colors," pick your palette, hit "Apply," and enjoy.

Go to label keyboard shortcut, by Bruce D

Never have to click on a label again. Instead, enable keyboard shortcuts and press "g" then "l" to display the "Go to label" pop-up. Start typing, and your labels will be filtered as you go. You can use the arrow keys to select a label and hit "Enter" to select one.

Powertip: The pop-up searches each word in your labels for a match, so if you have multiple labels with the same prefix, simply add a space, dash or slash after the prefix and search for the second word. For example, typing "labs" will display labels named "gmail labs," "gmail-labs," or "gmail/labs" but won't display "gmaillabs."

Navbar drag and drop, by Anatol P

If Labels are more important to you than your Contacts, you can switch them around with this Labs feature, which allows you to reorder the items in Gmail's lefthand navigation bar using drag and drop.

To turn on these Labs features and more, just go to the Labs tab under Settings. Keep posting feedback on the forums because we're reading what you have to say!

New Gmail code base now for IE6 too

2008-09-05T13:46:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jon Perlow, Gmail engineer

Last October, we launched a rewritten code base for the Gmail user interface to Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 users. Since then, we've added support for Safari 3 and Firefox 3 and improved performance in other browsers. This new code base included major performance improvements and provided us with a solid foundation for launching new features such as colored labels, group chat and rich emoticons, invisible mode, AIM integration, Gmail Labs, an updated contact manager, and remote sign out.

The newest version of Gmail pushes modern browser technology to the limit, so initially we weren't able to make it available to those of you who use IE6. Because it was released way back in 2001, IE6 wasn't able to handle the complexity of the new code in a way that met our performance and stability goals. Over the last few months, we've been working with the IE engineers at Microsoft to address these issues: they released a critical update to their JavaScript implementation that fixed a performance problem with how the script engine allocates and frees memory. We also made small simplifications to the UI when it runs in IE6 to improve stability. For example, we removed the drop shadow from contact pop-ups and the rounded corners from chat moles, both of which tended to cause problems in IE6.

This week, we've started to roll out Gmail's new code base to IE6 users. If you use IE6 and have the latest IE6 updates from Microsoft installed (or the specific patch that's required), you'll start seeing the features listed above.

Try Gmail in Google Chrome

2008-09-03T14:10:00.000-07:00

Posted by Brian Rakowski, Google Chrome Product Manager

Yesterday, we launched Google Chrome, a new approach to the web browser that comes with a few features that can give you a better Gmail experience:

A browser built for speed: Google Chrome features a new JavaScript engine, V8, that has been designed for performance from the ground up, so web applications like Gmail that use the browser to its fullest run lightning fast.

More room for your stuff, less browser window: We've removed all the unnecessary clutter from the browser window to give you more room for your favorite applications and websites. If you use an application shortcut (below), you can launch Gmail in its own streamlined window that gives you as much working room as possible, without the URL box or browser toolbar.

Application shortcuts: You can create an application shortcut to access Gmail straight from your desktop. Simply go to Gmail while you're using Google Chrome, click the page menu and select 'create application shortcuts.' When you double-click a shortcut icon, it opens in a streamlined window.

Crash control: Every tab you use is run independently in Google Chrome, so if one tab crashes, it won't take the tab with your inbox down with it.

Ready to try it out? Download Google Chrome and let us know what you think. (Chrome is currently available for Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or later and Windows Vista. Mac and Linux versions are being developed, so stay tuned.)

News from the Picasa team

2008-09-02T13:40:00.000-07:00

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Aside from email, one of the most frequent things I do on my computer is manage my ever-growing digital photo collection. I'm no Annie Leibowitz, but I still enjoy taking and sharing my pictures with others. And this process just got a lot better, especially for people who already use Gmail.

Today, Picasa Web Albums introduced a new "name tags" feature to help you automatically organize your photos based on who's in each picture. Gmail's contact list plays a key role in making name tags work: not only does it help you quickly auto-complete names as you tag the people in your photos, but any new contacts you create in Picasa Web Albums automatically become accessible in Gmail.

Speaking of email and photos: alongside name tags and a shiny new UI, email upload is another new Picasa Web Albums feature. Sending a picture to a web album is now as easy as specifying the album name in the subject, giving you an ideal way to upload photos from your mobile phone. (It's also great for forwarding pictures sent to your Gmail account directly into a web album.)

It's worth noting that the next generation of Picasa software for your PC is available today as a beta, so you can organize, edit, and share all the photos on your home PC. Like earlier versions of Picasa, Picasa 3 integrates directly with Gmail, and allows you to email photos or entire albums with just a click. Of course, Picasa 3 introduces a number of other goodies, too, ranging from a powerful photo retouching tool to fun stuff like improved photo collages and simple video editing.

Check out the Google Photos blog for more information and head to picasaweb.google.com to get started.

Little things that matter

2008-08-28T08:30:00.000-07:00

Posted by Prakash Chandran, User Experience Designer

Seemingly small improvements can make a surprisingly big difference to people who use our products every day. Take Google Calendar, where over the past few months we've made a bunch of little improvements in direct response to feedback from our most active users.

Emailing guests

We've long offered the ability to email meeting attendees, which can be extremely useful for sharing last-minute details or distributing meeting minutes afterward. But it was an all-or-nothing affair -- if you wanted to email only those people who hadn't responded, for example, you needed to manually fiddle with a list of email addresses.

In response, we made several improvements to the email guests dialog. You can now select guests based on their response status or pick-and-choose them individually with checkboxes.

Adding a friend's calendar

Displaying another person's calendar used to be a many-stepped process. It wasn't such a big deal if you only did it occasionally, but many of you do this numerous times a day, especially if you manage co-workers' calendars. It's much easier now: you simply start typing a name in the "Add a friend's calendar" box and we'll match against your address book. Click the name, and the calendar will be added.

Dragging to create new events

Making a new event from the Day or Week view is really easy -- you simply click on the time, drag the duration and enter a name. But if you have a busy calendar (and who doesn't?) you probably bumped into some problems. If an event is already scheduled for that time, there was no way to click and drag without messing up the other events on your calendar. You told us you often worked around this by creating the meeting in an open slot and dragging it to the desired time. Lots of extra work.

Here's proof that little things really do matter -- in this case, just a few pixels. We added a "gutter" to the edge where you can click-and-drag no matter how many events you already have at that time. Here's a before and after:

Flexible reminder times

We got lots of feedback about our event reminders, and particularly the limited number of time choices. One Googler actually asked for the ability to set eight minute reminders. Why eight minutes? He found that 5 minutes wasn't enough time to get to his meetings and 10 minutes was so early he tended to ignore them. Not everyone needs such precision, of course, but everyone deserves more flexibility. As of today, you can now set a reminder for any time between 4 weeks and 5 minutes before your event.
Perhaps big launches and shiny new features get most of the attention, but little things matter too. Even just a few pixels can turn "arrghh!" into "ahhhh!"

See what Obama, McCain and leading political pundits are reading

2008-08-18T12:37:00.000-07:00

Posted by Robby Stein, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Today we announced that both the Obama and McCain campaigns as well as political contributors from Newsweek to POLITICO are sharing news with Google Reader this election season. You can see their most recently shared items at google.com/powerreaders, or add the feeds from your favorite campaign or journalist to Reader to keep up with newly posted items and comments.

P.S. If you want to follow these political shared news feeds right from within Gmail, check out our post from a couple weeks ago about getting your favorite feeds in Gmail web clips.

Get your Google Calendar in 38 languages

2008-08-13T22:58:00.000-07:00

Posted by Ken Norton, Product Manager

One of our goals at Google is to give everyone the information they want in the language they speak. We've been hard at work making Google products available in as many languages as possible. Recently we launched Google Calendar in eight more languages, bringing our total number of supported languages to 38 (and closing in on Gmail's 50). The new languages are Latvian, Romanian, Filipino/Tagalog, Serbian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Hindi and Indonesian.

To use Google Calendar in your preferred language, just sign in, click Settings in the upper right hand corner and look for Language.

We feel your pain, and we're sorry

2008-08-11T18:05:00.000-07:00

Posted by Todd Jackson, Gmail Product Manager

Many of you had trouble accessing Gmail for a couple of hours this afternoon, and we're really sorry. The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this.

We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts. We followed all the emails to our support team and user group, we fielded phone calls from Google Apps customers and friends, and we saw the many Twitter posts. (We also heard from plenty of Googlers, who use Gmail for company email.) We never take for granted the commitment we've made to running an email service that you can count on.

We've identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we're conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly. We don't usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted. In general, though, if you spot a problem with your Gmail account, please visit the Gmail Help Center and user group, where the Gmail Guides are your fastest source of updates.

Again, we're sorry.

Tip: Customize your web clips

2008-08-04T19:29:00.001-07:00

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Product Marketing Manager

Gmail web clips display feeds (news headlines, blog posts, or pretty much anything in RSS/Atom format), ads and other information at the top of your inbox. They look like this:

There are some feeds in there by default, so you might be used to seeing headlines from the New York Times or recipes or a word of the day. But if you're not into cooking or already have a sweet vocabulary, you can customize your web clips under the Settings menu.

Just click on the 'Web Clips' tab to see a list of your current subscriptions, browse popular feeds by topic, and select the ones that interest you. You can also add your own URLs to get your favorite blogs and other news right above your inbox.

Making security easier

2008-07-24T14:00:00.000-07:00

Posted by Ariel Rideout, Gmail engineer

From the day we launched, Gmail has supported something called https. Https keeps your mail encrypted as it travels between your web browser and our servers, so someone sharing your favorite coffee shop's public wifi can't read it. Your bank and credit card websites use this same protocol to protect your financial data. Typically, free webmail services don't support https, but from the beginning we wanted to build a product so solid you could run a company on it -- we developed Gmail by running our own google.com mail on it -- so security is something we took seriously right from the start.

We use https to protect your password every time you log into Gmail, but we don't use https once you're in your mail unless you ask for it (by visiting https://mail.google.com rather than http://mail.google.com). Why not? Because the downside is that https can make your mail slower. Your computer has to do extra work to decrypt all that data, and encrypted data doesn't travel across the internet as efficiently as unencrypted data. That's why we leave the choice up to you.

We care about your security today just as much as we did when we launched, which is why we're constantly working on improvements like the recently launched last account activity and remote sign out. Today, we're making it even easier for you to use https to protect your mail every time you access it. We've added an option to Settings to always use https. If you don't regularly log in via unencrypted wireless connections at coffee shops or airports or college dorms, then you might not need this additional layer of security. But if you want to always use https, then this setting makes it super easy. Whenever you forget to type https://mail.google.com, we'll add the https for you. If you already have the https URL bookmarked, using this setting will ensure you access your account via https even when you don't use your bookmark. Any http link to Gmail (for example, the one at the top of Google.com) will be automatically redirected to https.

We're in the process of rolling this feature out to all Gmail and Google Apps users, so check back in your Settings menu if you don't see it right away. In the meantime, you can go directly to https://mail.google.com right now if you're nervous about snoops. (Or https://mail.google.com/a/example.com if your Google Apps domain is example.com.) Google Apps Premier Edition admins will also be able to select SSL connections for their users via a new preference in the control panel we'll be rolling out shortly.

P.S. Some products that connect to Gmail, like Google Toolbar, are not yet compatible with https. We're working to identify issues like this and get them fixed, so visit your product's Help Center if you encounter problems after enabling this setting. In particular, check out this Gmail Help Center page if you use the Gmail mobile app, as you may initially hit an error when you try to use it (we're working on a fix).

Updates to Gmail contact manager

2008-07-16T13:47:00.000-07:00

Posted by Benjamin Grol, Product Manager Engineer, Google Contacts Team

We've heard from some of you that Gmail's auto-added contacts can lead to too much address book clutter. One of the advantages of automatically creating contacts is that all of the addresses you email subsequently show up in auto-complete. We wanted to preserve this benefit while giving you the ability to have a clean, uncluttered contact list, and we've come up with a solution that's rolling out this week. It separates your contacts into two groups: "My Contacts" and "Suggested Contacts."

My Contacts contains the contacts you explicitly put in your address book (via manual entry, import or sync) as well as any address you've emailed a lot (we're using five or more times as the threshold for now).

Suggested Contacts is where Gmail puts its auto-created contacts. By default, Suggested Contacts you email frequently are automatically added to My Contacts, but for those of you who prefer tighter control of your address books, you can choose to disable usage-based addition of contacts to My Contacts (see the checkbox in the screenshot above). Once you do this, no matter how many times you email an auto-added email address it won't move to My Contacts.

We realize there's a lot more we can do to make Gmail contacts even more useful, but let us know what you think so far.

Chat with your Gmail contacts on the iPhone

2008-07-09T17:43:00.000-07:00

Posted by Marc Wilson, Software Engineer, Google mobile team

Last week, we launched a new version of Google Talk designed specifically for the iPhone. It works right in your Safari browser, so there's no need to download or install anything -- just go to talk.google.com and sign in.*

Because this version of Talk is designed to run in your browser, you'll be automatically signed out of Talk when you navigate to a different browser window or iPhone app. So while it's not a traditional "always-on" instant message client, it's useful for changing your status message on the go or checking in to see if someone's online and sending them a quick chat. It's equally nice for killing time at the airport.

*Google Apps users: visit http://talkgadget.google.com/a/your-domain.com/talkgadget/m from your iPhone's browser, but be sure to replace 'your-domain.com' with your actual domain name.

Fighting phishing with eBay and PayPal

2008-07-08T07:01:00.000-07:00

Posted by Brad Taylor, Software Engineer and Gmail Spam Czar

Phishing messages are a form of spam that attempt to deceive recipients to gain access to their personal information. A classic one is a message that appears to come from PayPal and attempts to get someone's PayPal password in order to drain his or her account. These fraudulent messages often look very official and can fool people into responding with personal information.

Gmail does its best to put a red warning label on phishing messages, but it can be hard for us to know sometimes and we can't be 100% perfect. So, for the fraction of a time when Gmail misses it, you may end up squinting three times and turning the message sideways before suspecting that it's phishing. Wouldn't it be better if you never saw phishing messages at all, not even in your spam folder? Since 2004, we've been supporting email authentication standards including DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to verify senders and help identify forged messages. This is a key tool we use to keep spam out of Gmail inboxes. But these systems can only be effective when high volume senders consistently use them to sign their mail -- if they're sending some mail without signatures, it's harder to tell whether it's phishing or not. Well, I'm happy to announce today that by working with eBay and PayPal, we're one step closer to stopping all phishing messages in their tracks.

Now any email that claims to come from "paypal.com" or "ebay.com" (and their international versions) is authenticated by Gmail and -- here comes the important part -- rejected if it fails to verify as actually coming from PayPal or eBay. That's right: you won't even see the phishing message in your spam folder. Gmail just won't accept it at all. Conversely, if you get an message in Gmail where the "From" says "@paypal.com" or "@ebay.com," then you'll know it actually came from PayPal or eBay. It's email the way it should be.

eBay and PayPal have worked hard to ensure that all their email is signed with DomainKeys and DKIM. Armed with this information, Gmail can easily reject as a fake anything that doesn't authenticate. We've been testing this for a few weeks now and it's working so well that few people really noticed.

We think it's great that PayPal and eBay have taken on the challenge of securing email, and we're pleased to have put our best efforts together to make this work. It's a bold move, but one that will really help fight phishing. Our hope is that this will set a good example for other organizations to follow (yes, it can be done!) and that over time more and more email will become trustworthy.

Remote sign out and info to help you protect your Gmail account

2008-07-07T13:35:00.000-07:00

Posted by Erwin D'Souza, Gmail Engineer

Your email account can contain a lot of personal information, from bank alerts to love letters. Email that, I'm sure, you don't always want other people to see. We understand how important your Gmail accounts are to you, so we're adding a new layer of information and control. With this new feature, you can now track your recent sessions and you can also sign yourself out remotely.

If you are anything like me, you probably sign in to Gmail from multiple computers. I, for example, occasionally sign into my Gmail account from a friend's house when I need to check an important email. Usually I remember to sign out, but every once in a while I wonder if I really did. Now I no longer have to wonder.

At the bottom of your inbox, you'll see information about the time of the last activity on your account and whether it's still open in another location:

Using the above example, a quick glance at the footer while I'm at work shows that my account is indeed open in one other location. But I recognize the IP address - it's my computer at home. Turns out I left my Gmail account open when I left home in a hurry this morning.

Your IP address, or Internet Protocol address, is a number associated with your computer when you connect to the Internet. Some of you might want to know your IP address numbers (more info on finding out your IP address below) for an extra layer of control. For others who don't want to think about IP information, you don't need to.

Continuing with the above example, I can see more details about my recent activity by clicking on the Details link:

The top table, under "Concurrent session information," indicates all open sessions, along with IP address and "access type" -- which refers to how email was retrieved, for example, through iGoogle, POP3 or a mobile phone. The bottom table, under "Recent activity," contains my most recent history along with times of access. I can also view my current IP address at the very bottom of this window, where it says "This computer is using IP address..."

With this information, I can quickly verify that all the Gmail activity was indeed mine. I remember using Gmail at the times and locations listed. Being extra cautious, I can also click on the "Sign out all other sessions" button to sign out of the account I left open at home.

Note: We are in the process of rolling this feature out to the latest version of Gmail, which is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.

Gmail blog turns 1: Looking back at our 10 most read tips

2008-07-03T13:28:00.000-07:00

Posted by Robby Stein, Associate Product Marketing Manager

When we launched the Gmail blog exactly one year ago, our goal was to provide you with new feature announcements, insight into how the Gmail team works, and tips on how to become a Gmail ninja. We hope you've enjoyed reading our posts, and to celebrate our birthday, here's a look back at the past year and a recap of our 10 most read tips:

10) Have Gmail do your laundry - How to suggest new features for Gmail. We always like hearing from you.

9) Tips for importing old email to Gmail - A post on how to make the switch to Gmail as seamless as possible.

8) Edit contacts right from your chat list - When we released the newest version of Gmail, it came with some new bells and whistles. This one will help you clean up your chat list and change contact information quickly.

7) 2 Hidden ways to get more from your Gmail address - You can insert certain characters to your email address to get additional names out of it -- all of which still make it to your inbox.

6) How to find any email with Gmail search - To take the best advantage of Gmail search, we explain how to use search operators so you can find any email the first time.

5) 5 little-known Gmail features you may not yet know about - When we released the newest version of Gmail, there were a bunch of really useful features people didn't yet know about. So we told you about them.

4) Top 10 little known Gmail features (and Part 2) - In this post, we explained ten Gmail features that people generally didn't know about. From "custom from" to creating events in Gmail, this post goes over key features any serious Gmail user needs to know.

3) Getting Gmail anywhere: IMAP versus POP - A lot of people choose to get Gmail on mobile phones and destkop mail clients, so we went over the two most popular ways people do so and showed the key benefits of using IMAP -- which we've provided for free since the fall.

2) 3 Gmail Labs features that will spice up your inbox - This post covers how to enable and use the most popular Gmail Labs features: Superstars, Pictures in chat and Quick Links.

1) 9 reasons to archive - From the sophisticated to the snarky, these tips fueled the most viewed post in Gmail blog history. If this doesn't get you to archive, then we don't know what will.

Thanks for reading this past year, and we hope to provide even more tips this year -- so stay tuned.

Tip: Set Gmail as your default email client in Firefox 3

2008-07-02T13:48:00.000-07:00

Posted by Robby Stein, Associate Product Marketing Manager

For those of you using newly released Firefox 3, or willing to give it a try, you can take advantage of a new feature that lets you set Gmail as the default for all email links -- those that contain "mailto:" in them. If you're like me and don't have a default email client set up, then clicking these links typically launches an installation wizard for a destkop mail client, or opens some email software that you don't actually use.

Now you can configure Firefox to launch Gmail when you click on email address links and avoid the hassle. The folks over at Lifehacker published these tips on how to set it up:

1) Go to Gmail and sign in.

2) While in Gmail, copy and paste the following into your browser's address bar and hit enter.

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://
mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Gmail")

Google Apps users can use this code (but be sure to replace yourdomain.com with your Google Apps domain name):

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://
mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Gmail")

3) Click "Add Application" when you are prompted¹. Congrats, you just added Gmail to your browser's list of mail clients.

4) To set Gmail as your default, click on this link and you will be prompted with a dialog box listing available email applications. By selecting Gmail and checking "Remember my choice for mailto links" you won't have to tell your browser again. (You don't actually need to send an email after you click that link.)

You can always change this setting by going into "Tools" > "Options" (or "Firefox" > "Preferences," for Mac users) selecting "Applications" and going to the "mailto" option. There's a drop down next to the option that lets you change your default. Clicking "Application details" will take you to a settings page where you can completely remove Gmail or other mail apps.

¹If nothing happens when you type in the code, double check that you copied the entire snippet correctly, and if nothing happens, you probably changed an advanced setting (maybe without even knowing) and need to set it back to default. To do it, type about:config into your browser and make sure that network.protocol-handler.external.mailto is on the default setting: true.

Evolution of Gmail chat

2008-06-20T15:35:00.000-07:00

Nika Smith, User Experience

Often, the features we launch seem so simple that you might think they're the result of blatantly obvious design decisions. In fact, every feature is subjected to a healthy dose of scrutiny within the Gmail team, and usually that includes rapidly iterating on designs by collecting user feedback, learning what works and what doesn't, and improving on our work based on this knowledge.

Gmail chat is a great example of this: we went through handfuls of design ideas, from the tame to the insane, before coming up with the pop-up chat window (which is also called a chat "mole") that exists today. Here are a couple of the early ideas we tried out:

Chat within threads, making chats feel strongly related to the emails that may have spurred them:

Separate tabs for each chat conversation, which provided lots of space for chatting and kept these conversations separate from the inbox:

We took each of these ideas into the usability lab where users were asked to try them out and tell us what they thought. From these studies we learned that chatting was one of many multi-tasking activities that users performed, and that chats needed to be quickly available at any time, not just within a single email or on a separate page. So we tried a design reminiscent of a sticky note that stayed up on the page at all times:

Once again, we collected feedback on this design, leading to even more refinements. One of the biggest findings was that no one knew how to send a message because there was no Send button. Adding instructions (initially with a bright yellow background, and later with a more subtle design) made all the difference:

With chat and other features, collecting live feedback from real users helps evolve feature ideas into simple and more elegant experiences. These extra steps may add a little time to our development cycle, but they allow us to create a design that works well for the tens of millions of Gmail users.

3 Gmail Labs features that will spice up your inbox

2008-06-16T12:09:00.000-07:00

Posted by Robby Stein, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Last week we launched Gmail Labs, a way for you to test out experimental Gmail features before they're ready for prime time. This week, we want to show you what the most popular Labs features can do for your inbox. To use any Gmail Labs feature* visit the Labs tab under Settings, and select “Enable” next to each one you want to turn on. When you're finished picking features, click “Save changes” to apply the new settings. Here's a mini guide to the most popular ones:

Superstars: Adds new star designs to better differentiate important email.

After enabling Superstars, simply click on the star icon repeatedly to rotate through new star options. If you have shortcuts enabled, hitting the “s” key consecutively will do the same. There are more star designs then the ones set as default -- to select different variations, click Settings and look for the Superstars section under the General tab. Drag the icons listed as “not in use” to “in use” to make changes to your star lineup. Once enabled, you can use Superstars to help prioritize and manage emails. For example, you can add a "!" icon star on emails that have critical or timely information, such as bank information, or you can add a "✓" icon star to emails associated with a task you've completed, such as paying a bill online.

Pictures in chat: Adds your friends' photos to the chat window.

Make Gmail chat a little more personal. Now you can view a picture of your friends when you chat with them. (Tip: If your friend doesn't have a picture, you can suggest one by clicking on the placeholder picture in Contacts under your friend's name).

Quick Links: Bookmarks common Gmail views.

Quick Links allows you to create a shortcut to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. Just click "Add Quick Link" to save a link to the page you are currently viewing. You can then jump to that page any time with one click. For example, you can add a link to a draft email where you keep your to do list, or an email with your frequent flyer information. You can also save a common Gmail search by conducting the search (let's say for "is:unread" -- which brings up all your unread mail) and then clicking "Add Quick Link."

If you have suggestions for ways we can improve any of the Labs features, or want to suggest a new one, please visit our Labs discussion forum. The engineers who built Gmail Labs features keep an eye on discussions, and your feedback will help them make the features great.

*Gmail Labs is currently only available in US and UK English and to Google Apps users whose administrators have opted in to new features from the control panel.