Official Gmail Blog
News, tips and tricks from Google's Gmail team and friends.
New in Labs: Play Google Voice messages in Gmail
September 9, 2009
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.
Four new themes
September 3, 2009
Posted by Jake Knapp, UI Designer and Manu Cornet, Software Engineer
Manu
: Hey Jake, you still using that same old theme?
Jake
: Well, yeah. I mean, I like it -- but I don't know... I guess it just doesn't feel as new as it used to.
Manu
: I hear ya. Well, good news! Today four new themes are out there for everybody. Just go to the
Themes tab under Settings
...and ta da!
Jake
: (click, click) There we go!
Manu
: Should we tell people about why we created these four themes?
Jake
: We should.
Manu
: Assuming they're still reading.
Jake
: Right. Okay, well,
Gmail themes
have been out since November, and I know we were ready for some new ones.
Manu
: And we heard some of you asking for new ones too. So we thought about what we wanted to stare at all day long, since we work on Gmail.
Jake
: I've been living in Zurich for the last year, and I missed Washington State, where I grew up. The Orcas Island theme definitely takes away a little bit of that homesickness with a new image each day of the week.
Manu
: Homesickness eh? What about timesickness?
Jake
: There's such a thing?
Manu
: Totally. Sometimes I find myself timesick.
Jake
: For when?
Manu
: For a simpler time. For a time when processors weren't too fast. When graphics weren't too realistic.
Jake
: Sounds like a real bummer. Too bad there's no cure for timesickness.
Manu
: That's where you're dead wrong, my friend. Take a look at High Score. It's like being in a time machine isn't it?
Jake
: (click, click) Aren't these colors a little bright?
Manu
: Aren't you supposed to be a designer?
Jake
: We'll have to agree to disagree, my friend. This one just isn't for me. I need something soothing. Something like laying face down in the grass.
Manu
: I suppose you're talking about Turf now. What's the story behind that one?
Jake
: Well, who doesn't like the color green?
Manu
: And it doesn't change every day, so it was easier for us to make.
Jake
: Are you suggesting we're lazy?
Manu
: Prove that we're not.
Jake
: We just made four new themes. How about that?
Manu
: It took us ten months. And the fourth theme (Random) merely cycles through all the others.
Jake
: Well, enjoy these themes for now. And, of course,
let us know
what you think. Maybe we'll have some more for you in the next ten months ;)
More ninja tips in more languages
September 3, 2009
Posted by Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager
When we published the
Gmail tips guide
in July, we promised it would help you become a Gmail ninja. Now, if you want to become a Gmail ниндзя or 忍者, you can do that too: these tips are now available in
Spanish
,
French
,
Brazilian Portuguese
,
Japanese
,
Russian
, and
UK English
.
We've also added a handful of new tips to the English site, culled from suggestions you submitted. Some of the new tricks to help manage your email efficiently include
sending and receiving mail from multiple addresses
,
adding formatting to chat messages
, and
selecting multiple messages at once
using shift-select. Thanks to everyone who submitted ideas, and please
keep them coming
.
Update (1/12)
: The Gmail tips guide is also now available in
German
,
Italian
,
Polish
,
Dutch
,
Simplified Chinese
and
Traditional Chinese
.
New in Calendar: Sports schedules and contacts' birthdays
September 2, 2009
Posted by Ian Whitfield, Software Engineering Intern
People keep track of lots of things in their Google Calendars — meetings, business trips, due dates and conference calls. But when I started my summer internship at Google, I wondered why it wasn't easier to add calendar events for the fun stuff in life, like birthdays and sports schedules.
Now, when you look under "Other Calendars," click "Add," then "Browse Interesting Calendars" (or use this
link to the Calendar directory
), you'll find calendars for hundreds of teams in dozens of sports leagues — everything from the National Football League to the Korean FA Cup.
When you subscribe to your favorite team's calendar, you'll see every game listed, updated in real time with the score as the game progresses.
You can also subscribe to a "Contacts' Birthdays and Events" calendar, which will add all of your contacts' birthdays to Google Calendar. Data is pulled from your Gmail contacts and your friends' Google
profiles
.
Finally, we also have two new Calendar Labs features for you to check out: "Dim future repeating events" makes recurring meetings more transparent over time, helping more important meetings pop out, and "Add any gadget by URL" gives you the flexibility put any gadget you'd like in your calendar.
More on today's Gmail issue
September 1, 2009
Posted by Ben Treynor, VP Engineering and Site Reliability Czar
Gmail's web interface had a widespread outage earlier today, lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there's a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I'd like to apologize to all of you — today's outage was a Big Deal, and we're treating it as such. We've already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we're currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.
Here's what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail's servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn't in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail's web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.
However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system "stop sending us traffic, we're too slow!". This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn't access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn't be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don't use the same routers.
The Gmail engineering team was alerted to the failures within seconds (we take monitoring very seriously). After establishing that the core problem was insufficient available capacity, the team brought a LOT of additional request routers online (flexible capacity is one of the advantages of Google's architecture), distributed the traffic across the request routers, and the Gmail web interface came back online.
What's next: We've turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn't happen again. Some of the actions are straightforward and are already done — for example, increasing request router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom. Some of the actions are more subtle — for example, we have concluded that request routers don't have sufficient failure isolation (i.e. if there's a problem in one datacenter, it shouldn't affect servers in another datacenter) and do not degrade gracefully (e.g. if many request routers are overloaded simultaneously, they all should just get slower instead of refusing to accept traffic and shifting their load). We'll be hard at work over the next few weeks implementing these and other Gmail reliability improvements — Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users, and we're committed to keeping events like today's notable for their rarity.
Today's Gmail problems
September 1, 2009
Posted by David Besbris, Engineering Director
Update (2:37 pm)
: We've fixed the issue, and Gmail should be back up and running as usual. We're still investigating the root cause of this outage, and we'll share more information soon. Thanks for bearing with us.
We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now — we are too, and we definitely feel your pain. We don't usually post about minor issues here (the
Apps status dashboard
and the
Gmail Help Center
are usually where this kind of information goes). Because this is impacting so many of you, we wanted to let you know we're currently looking into the issue and hope to have more info to share here shortly. If you have
IMAP
or
POP
set up already, you should be able to access your mail that way in the meantime. We're terribly sorry for the inconvenience and will get Gmail back up and running as soon as possible.
Find great stuff to read in Google Reader
August 28, 2009
Posted by Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager
Have you ever clicked the "Reader" link at the top of your Gmail inbox and ended up in
Google Reader
, kind of unsure about what to do next?
We realize this happens from time to time, so to help people get started with Reader, we asked a bunch of prominent journalists, techies, fashion critics, and foodies for their lists of favorite sites and blogs. We compiled their reading lists and
made them accessible
to everyone at
google.com/powerreaders
, where you can explore and subscribe to lists from
Thomas Friedman
,
Arianna Huffington
,
Paul Krugman
, the editors of
Lifehacker
,
Boing Boing
,
Kottke.org
, and many more.
Whether you're new to Google Reader or already have an extensive reading list, we hope this will be a good place to find great stuff to read. And if you want to
create your own reading list
to share with others, you can do that too.
Composing a message? Try the contact chooser
August 25, 2009
Posted by Benjamin Grol, Product Manager
When composing messages, you probably rely pretty heavily on
auto-complete
to add recipients. Auto-complete is convenient and fast, and usually does the trick. But sometimes seeing your list of contacts can help you remember all the people you want to include on your email. So, we've added a contact chooser to Gmail. Click the "To:" link (or Cc:/Bcc:) when composing a message and you'll see something like this:
You can click on the contacts you want to add or search for others.
If you use contact
groups
, your groups will appear in a drop-down menu in the contact chooser, so you can select contacts from the groups you've already created. And if you happen to use Gmail in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, being able to pick from your list of contacts should be particularly useful since auto-complete doesn't offer the same search as you type experience that it does in other languages.
Email a task list
August 21, 2009
Posted by Michael Bolin, Software Engineer
Sometimes you need to get your tasks out of Tasks. Although you already know
how I feel about paper
, we decided to add support for printing with
Tasks's graduation from Gmail Labs
. Today we're offering another export solution which doesn't kill trees: emailing a task list.
Like most Tasks features, "Email task list" can be found in the Actions menu.
Clicking on it will open a new compose window with the contents of your current task list. This works in all views (my order, sort by date, completed), so to email your mom to explain why you've been so busy and haven't been able to return her calls, just choose "View completed tasks" from the Actions menu, then "Email task list" and send away. (Note: this may not be very convincing if you haven't actually checked anything off your list recently.)
If you want to let us know how Tasks is working for you, we're now available on Twitter at
http://twitter.com/googletasks
. Like most
Google accounts on Twitter
, we won't be able to respond to every question or feature request, but sometimes you might get lucky and we'll have an answer for you. Oh and
@sayanghosh
, today is your lucky day.
Mail and contact import for everyone
August 19, 2009
Posted by Marcin Brodziak, Software Engineer
A few months ago, we added the ability to
import your old mail and contacts to Gmail
. We made this feature available for all newly-created Gmail accounts first, since people new to Gmail benefit most from being able to move their stuff with them. Friends who wanted to use Gmail but kept telling us how painful it would be finally made the switch!
But many old time Gmail users (including us) also have old accounts lurking. Often, these accounts predate Gmail, and occasionally we have to log into them to look at some old confirmation email or find the email address for someone with whom we've lost touch.
Now, with just a few clicks anyone can copy all of that to your Gmail account. It's easy — just go to the
Settings > Accounts & Import
page and click "Import mail and contacts." A window will pop out to lead you through the short import process. If you want us to continue to forward any new mail your other account gets for 30 days, we can do that too.
Copying mail over usually takes a couple days, occasionally up to a week — but eventually it all arrives. And once it's done, you can forget your old account and enjoy having everything in one place.
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