Google adds thirteen new Gmail features

Gmail added 13 new features today with more on the way. You can access these new features in your Gmail setting page under the “Labs” section.

Google gets tons of suggestions for new features every day and they do their best they can to add it to Gmail. Most of the features we see in Gmail now are user suggestions (delete button, vacation responder, and IMAP and others) and implemented by Gmail engineers. Now with Gmail Labs, Google wants to add more features and based on their popularity with the users, the future Gmail will have them as standard features.

The 13 new features may not look impressive at first but it is a great start and some of the features take e-mail browsing in the web to a different level.

The new features are:

• Quick Links – You can save all the search queries made in Gmail and refer them in future via Quick links.

• Superstars - Additional star icons that you can use.

• Pictures in chat - You can see your friends’ profile pictures when you are chatting with them. With Gmail, chat feature is embedded so you can chat with Google and AIM friends.

• Fixed width font - View messages with a fixed width font.

• Custom keyboard shortcuts - Customize Gmail shortcuts so they are easier to remember for you.

• Mouse gestures - Handy app that adds mouse gestures to Gmail. (this one is probably the best of the whole list)

• Signature tweaks - Moves the signature to before the quoted text.

• Random signature - Generates a random signature quote for each mail sent to your contacts, instead of standard signature.

• Custom date formats - Probably also one of the more useful labs extensions.

• Muzzle - Hides your friends’ status message in the chat box.

• Old Snakey - Play the classic “snake” game in Gmail.

• Email Addict - Forces you to take a 15 minute break from Gmail.

• Hide Unread Counts - Removes the number of unread messages for “inbox”, “labels” etc.

Among these features I like Superstars, Fixed width font, Random signature (from brainyquotes.com) and custom date formats. There is a feedback link in every feature, you can send in your thoughts about it. The more customers like it and use, these new features will automatically be included in the new version.

To enable any or all of the features do the following:

Go to your Gmail account --> Click “Settings” or Click “Labs” icon (appears as a test tube) --> Click “Labs” --> You will see a list of features, choose “enable” or “disable” option --> Click “Save”.

But since these features are in a testing phase, there might be an occasional crash or crashes. To access the previous version, just visit http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0 and Labs will be temporarily disabled.