Official Gmail Blog
News, tips and tricks from Google's Gmail team and friends.
Tips from a Digital Mom - Getting 'cultural' with the family during the holidays
November 21, 2007
Posted by Jen "Digital Mom" Grant, Group Product Marketing Manager
Every once in a while my husband and I wonder why we don't do more "cultural" things with the kids, especially around the holidays. We're so busy and we just don't have the time to keep up with what's going on around town or around the area. Usually, when we do go somewhere it's because we bump into someone who tells us that the local dance group is doing
The Nutcracker
, not because we read the paper or got any announcements.
But just the other day, I discovered the public calendar search button in
Google Calendar
. Of course, I had known it was there, but it had never occurred to me that events in my local area would be included. Just to experiment, I typed in
Palo Alto, CA kids
and found a fabulous calendar that showed me every day that there are events for families during the holiday season. One example I found is "Helicopter Santa" on Dec. 1: cookies, candy canes, and Santa at the Hiller Aviation Museum. I added this calendar to my own and now I can quickly check what's going on at any time.
My husband wonders how I suddenly seem to know everything. I just smile.
5 little-known Gmail features you may not yet know about
November 16, 2007
Posted by Robby Stein, Associate Product Marketing Manager
When we began rolling out a
new Gmail code architecture
a few weeks ago, we also launched some new features to help improve the speed and convenience of managing email. I've been using several of these new additions over the last few weeks, and while they might seem small on their own, they really can add up to save you a lot of time and hassle. That's why I decided to list my five favorite new features that are so new, you may not have noticed them. We are still rolling them out to IE6, international and Google Apps users, but for those of you who noticed a new contact manager among other recent improvements in our latest version, here they are:
5. "Archive and next" shortcut
We added a bunch of new
shortcuts
to Gmail, but one that I've found to be a true time-saver is what I call the "archive and next" shortcut. When I have a lot of mail, it can be really annoying to have to open a message, click "Back to Inbox" and then select the next email I want to read. So once you enable shortcuts in Settings, you can simply press the left bracket key "
[
" while viewing a message to archive it, and then immediately open the next oldest one. When I see a long list of unread messages, I like to open the first one and then just hit "
[
" to swiftly move through my mail and archive as I go. (P.S. By clicking the right bracket "
]
" you can also move the other way if you want to open newer messages after you archive).
4. Share mail searches with friends
How many times do your friends tell you, "I can't find that email you sent me." Now you can prove that you did indeed send that message, despite the accusations. All you have to do is search for the message using your
expert mail searching
skills, and when you find it listed in the results, just copy and paste the URL and email it to your friend. When he or she goes to that link while in Gmail, your friend's Gmail will run the same search you ran and will be able to locate that "lost" email instantly. For example, if you wanted to share a search for "pick me up at airport," so flight information can be located, you would send over this URL:
http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/pick+me+up+at+airport
.
3. Browser navigation and history
Your web browser is now a great way to navigate Gmail. Instead of having to find the right links on the page to move from inbox to messages to other Gmail views, you can use the browser navigation buttons (back and forward) to jump back and forth between emails. You can also open your browser history and click on specific emails that you've read to go right back to them. This allows you to quickly access certain emails without having to re-read your inbox. Browser history is something that often doesn't work well on complex web apps like Gmail, but we've gone to great lengths to make it work right.
2. Bookmark emails
I frequently need to save a single email for a period of time, such as a message that includes an important phone number. But I don't want to create a separate label for one message, and I also don't want to archive all the email that comes in after that message just to keep that thread near the top of my inbox--and hopefully the top of my mind. This problem is now easily solved by a new ability to bookmark specific emails. All emails now have dedicated URLs, so just by adding a browser bookmark while viewing a message, you can return to it whenever you want, just like a regular web page--although you will still have to log in to Gmail if you've signed out.
1. "Filter messages like this"
I find filters to be one of the most useful features in Gmail, but sometimes it can be hard to set them up quickly. So we added a new capability that makes a filter based on the message you are reading, so you can keep track of future similar emails. By clicking on the dropdown menu in the upper right-hand corner of every email (the upside-down triangle), you can now see the option to "Filter messages like this." Not only can you easily create a filter based on the sender, but this is especially handy if you are trying to filter emails sent to mailing lists. We automatically set up a filter for you based on the "list ID" header, which does a better job of finding emails sent to mailing lists.
With a touch of style, Gmail gets some new threads
November 9, 2007
Posted by Kevin Systrom, Associate Product Marketing Manager
Congratulations to Robert Gould, the winner of our Threadless t-shirt competition. With much deliberation, we picked his design out of 420 submitted designs to win a pretty sweet prize package that includes an iPhone and some other goodies. His winning design is entitled 'Hello Dave':
We'd like to thank all the contributors for their snazzy designs - we loved
all of them
. If you'd like, you can pick up a copy of
Robert's winning t-shirt over at Threadless
, and even post a creative picture of yourself wearing the shirt.
P.S. We aren't making any money on this; all proceeds go to Threadless.
IMAP access now available for all users
October 31, 2007
Posted by David Murray, Associate Product Manager
Last week we
announced
we were providing you with free IMAP access and said we would roll out the feature over time as fast as we could. I'm happy to say that all Gmail users can now enable IMAP and sync their inbox across devices. Right now you'll only see IMAP settings in Gmail if you're using the English (US) interface, but IMAP will appear for all languages in the coming weeks.
Check out our Help Center
to learn more about IMAP, or
watch our video
to learn how to quickly set it up on the iPhone.
Update: I'm also pleased to say that Gmail users with custom email addresses (through
Google Apps
) can now enable IMAP too.
How our spam filter works
October 31, 2007
Posted by Todd Jackson, Gmail Product Manager
I got lucky in April 2004, when Gmail had just launched, and I snagged one of the first invitations (I didn't work at Google at the time, but had a few friends who did). One of the first things I noticed was the spam filter. I had used another webmail service for the previous few years and was used to seeing spam in my inbox every day. With Gmail, I almost never did, and what's more, I didn't have legitimate email ending up in the spam folder (I eventually just stopped looking there). This is still true today, even though I've had my email address for 3+ years and use it on many sites around the web.
Now that I work on Gmail, not only do I keep an eye on my personal email, but I also monitor Gmail-wide stats which rigorously measure how our spam filters are doing. And despite an increase in spam targeted at Gmail, we're keeping more unwanted messages out of your inbox than ever before:
We get mail and read posts all the time from people who've noticed these results:
"None of my real emails have slipped into the spam folder and I remember only one spam reaching my inbox in the period I've been using Gmail. Spam is the bane of the Internet and it is refreshing to see Gmail put up such a good fight against it." - Eric, who wrote into our support team
"I've been using Gmail as my main email account ever since I started receiving an average of 2,500 emails a day...of which 70 percent are...personal health products, free software, and more! If not for this wonderful spam filter of Gmail, I'd have to spend 48 hours sitting in front of my mail 24/7 just to keep up!" - Nicholas, CNET blogger
To help explain how our spam filter works, we put together
a video starring some of our anti-spam engineers
. Enjoy!
Code changes to prepare Gmail for the future
October 29, 2007
Posted by Dan Pupius, Gmail engineer
When Gmail launched in 2004, the web was a very different place: people's expectations were different, browser capabilities were less advanced, and
certain
terms
that are now commonplace on software engineer résumés hadn't even been coined yet.
In the past three and a half years we have launched a number of cool features: deep
chat integration
,
voice mail
,
Google Docs integration
, and most recently,
free IMAP
. During this time we've learned a lot about building large web applications and what happens when you push web browsers to their limits.
So recently the Gmail team has been working on a structural code change that we'll be rolling out to Firefox 2 and IE 7 users over the coming weeks (with other browsers to follow). You won't notice too many differences to start with, but we're using a new model that enables us to iterate faster and share components (we now use the same rich text editor as
Groups
and
Page Creator
, and the Contact Manager can be seen in several Google apps). A few other things you will notice are
some new keyboard shortcuts
and the ability to bookmark specific messages and email searches.
We have also been fanatical about speed. Even on a fast Internet connection, it can take a second to request and render a new web page, and when you read a lot of mail, these seconds can accumulate to hours waiting for email to load. We've spent a lot of time profiling all parts of the application, shaving milliseconds off wherever we can, and figuring out workarounds for some pretty deep-rooted issues with the current browser implementations. Some of the most common actions should be faster now. For instance, we prefetch messages in the current view, so when you open an email your browser doesn't have to talk to Google's server; it just displays the message. These techniques really shine on newer browsers and computers. Using an alpha version of Safari 3 on a MacBook, we're seeing sub-200ms times when opening messages—pretty quick.
One side effect of this change is that if you're using third-party Gmail extensions, they're likely to stop working. We've contacted a number of the developers behind some popular extensions and provided them with an opportunity to create fixes, so check back with them for updates. We're sorry that it may be a bit of a inconvenience, but we're trying to make this change as smooth as possible.
The team has a bunch more things in the works, so stay tuned.
Update (11/9):
While we (like most web services) don't officially support third-party extensions like Greasemonkey scripts, we realize that some of our most active users want to write and run them. Because these scripts directly modify a web service's code rather than using a stable API, they tend to be fragile to even small changes in a web app's code (and can even create bugs in the web app itself).
To make this easier on our Greasemonkey users, we've recently added an experimental
Gmail/Greasemonkey API
that should make these types of scripts easier to write and more robust to code changes. (Note that this applies only to users who have installed Greasemonkey scripts -- if the term "Greasemonkey" evokes little more for you than an image of an oily mechanic, then you needn't worry about any of this.)
Sync your inbox across devices with free IMAP
October 24, 2007
Posted by David Murray, Associate Product Manager
There are two online petitions I've signed in my life. One was for a "
Xena: Warrior Princess
" movie. The other, which I signed a few months before starting at Google, was for Gmail IMAP. As some of you know, IMAP is the best way to access your email from multiple devices (e.g. phone or desktop). It keeps the same information synced across all devices so that whatever you do in one place shows up everywhere else you might access your email.
For example, I can:
read an email in Gmail, then
move it to the "Starred" folder on my iPhone, then
archive it by moving it to "All Mail" in Thunderbird, then
see all of those changes on my Blackberry (or any of the above devices for that matter).
For the past few years, we've offered POP access, which is similar to IMAP but lacks one critical feature: your changes made on other devices aren't seen in Gmail when you log back in. Instead you are presented with a list of unread mail, and you must re-read and re-sort everything. For this reason, as soon as I started at Google, IMAP was one of the first things I asked about. Since then, I've seen countless blog posts, requests, chats, and just about everything else asking, "Are you guys ever going to do IMAP?" Well now I can say: Yes. Yes,
we are doing IMAP
. In fact, we are doing it for you for
free
on all devices and platforms.
As we roll out the feature over the next couple of days, you will be able to use Gmail at work, in your car, or just about anywhere on any device, and actions you take will be automatically synced with Gmail on the web (and remember it works the other way too: anything you do on the Web will be seen on your phone or in your mail client). Just click the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab in your Gmail "Settings" and turn it on. (Psst. If you don't see the "IMAP" in the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab, then check back soon. We are giving it to users as fast as we can).
Now if only they'll make that
Xena movie
...
Updated Gmail for mobile application
October 15, 2007
Posted by Joanne McKinley, Gmail mobile team
Accessing Gmail on my phone has become indispensable to me. So often, I need to do things like search through my archive to find the name of that coffee shop where I'm going to meet a friend, or to send a quick email when I don't have access to my laptop. Gmail for mobile helps make this all very easy and fast. I can access my whole archive, and send emails to anyone in my contacts list -- through an interface that's very familiar. We just released a new version with some updates that you can get by pointing your phone's browser to
http://gmail.com/app
. The new version works on most phones that are Java ME enabled. For BlackBerry devices, you can continue to download the previous version from the same site.
The new version of Gmail for mobile is faster than before -- and consumes a lot less data. It also has a number of new features, including:
more than 30 percent faster overall, and 80 percent faster for some tasks
a contacts viewer to view your all Gmail contacts and addresses
an outgoing mail footer to let your recipients know you've sent an email from a mobile device
click-to-call phone numbers which you can call without retyping the number
emails are saved for later re-editing if connection drops or if you want to perform another task before sending out the message
Gmail
keyboard shortcuts
to perform tasks faster (on phones with full keyboards).
Learn more
about Gmail for mobile and other mobile services.
More Gmail storage coming for all
October 12, 2007
Posted by Rob Siemborski, Gmail Engineer
When people ask me about my job, one of the common questions I get is, "Where does Gmail put all that mail?" I generally answer by pointing them to a web site like
this one
. While that's not exactly how it works, we do spend a lot of time working to make sure our users have
all the space they need
.
In April 2005, we started increasing Gmail storage as part of our
"Infinity+1" storage plan
. At that time, we realized we'd never reach infinity, but we promised to keep giving Gmail users more space as we were able. That said, a few of you are using Gmail so much that you're running out of space, so to make good on our promise, today we're announcing we are speeding up our
counter
and giving out more free storage.
And, just in case you are like my friend Miriam, whose sister sends minute to minute photo updates of her kids in
RAW format
, then we still have a
paid storage
program where you can get your fix, and we're giving you more space than before for the same price.
By the way, businesses, schools and organizations using
Google Apps
to get Gmail on their own custom addresses (like
Google does
for our @google.com accounts) will get a storage boost in the coming days, too.
Standard and Education Edition
storage (now at 2GB) will begin matching Gmail's counter, and
Premier Edition
users get a whopping 25 GB (up from 10 GB).
Google Reader: Out of Labs
October 3, 2007
Posted by Nick Baum, Associate Product Manager
You may have noticed that
Google Reader
recently parted ways with
Google Labs
. If you're not familiar with Reader, it's Google's feed aggregator. Think of it as your inbox for the web: just subscribe to the news sites, blogs, or videos you want to follow. You can read all the updates in one place -- there's no need to visit 20 different sites to get all this stuff. To see how it works, try subscribing to this blog by clicking on the "Site Feed" link in the on the right-hand side. You'll find similar links on most blogs, and many news sites too. For further explanation about why feed readers are so great, watch
RSS in Plain English
:
So why has Reader graduated from Google Labs? There have been a bunch of feature updates in recent months. Reader now has
offline access
using Google Gears, a new
search tool
, it's available in
10 languages
, and will show you
trends
about your reading and subscribing habits. There's even a version of Reader for the Nintendo
Wii
. (But, really, we found
the chemistry
with Labs just wasn't there anymore.)
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