It’s hard to remember a product I’ve become so dependent on quicker than Gmail’s new Priority Inbox. I’m so addicted, that the few times I’ve accidentally clicked on the old “regular” Inbox view in the past week have really annoyed me. So much so that I actually moved that view into my “more” drop down (you can drag any sidebar item in there). And now I have good news: you can all share in this addiction.
While it began rolling out to users on Monday, Google is now saying that Priority Inbox should be available to all users (including Google Apps users) today. Look for the “New! Priority Inbox” message in red in the top right corner of your Gmail account to activate it. There’s a slight learning curve with it, so you’ll still probably want to watch Google’s official video. But once you get started, it’s unlikely that you’ll go back. → Read More
Editor’s note: Guest author Adam Rifkin is a Silicon Valley veteran who organizes a networking group for entrepreneurial engineers called 106 Miles. In this post he argues that Gmail is perhaps not the best vessel for Google’s social ambitions.
Last week was marred for me by a temporary but super-painful Gmail failure, and the software’s behavior points to why a “more social” Gmail would be a PERMANENT FAILURE. It pains me to write this because I actually believe the Gmail team has been the best web application team long-term in the entire company, and they come way closer than anyone else inside Google to understanding how normal people work and think.
So it’s telling that even within the Gmail team, there is a basic, fundamental, deep-seeded inability to put things together in a contextually graceful way that makes sense to actual (non-Googler) users—in other words, to deliver a great user experience. Let me explain with a personal experience. → Read More
Hopefully you’re reading this as you’re waking up with access to Gmail Priority Inbox. Jason already posted his review/overview last night, so I figured I’d just talk a bit about how I’ve been using it for the past several days since Google turned it on for me to test out on my account. My opinion of it is in-line with Jason’s — once you fine-tune it, it’s game-changingly awesome. There is simply no way I could ever go back to using Gmail without it enabled. So how have I tuned it?
First of all, before you get started, I highly recommend that you watch the overview video Google made for the feature. It’s two minutes long, and makes the basics easy to understand. For most people, the basics are probably good enough. But for people who get a lot of email, you’re going to want to go a bit deeper.
My favorite aspect of Priority Inbox is the settings that allows you to create four different sections of your inbox. Yes, you could previously do this with the Multiple Inboxes feature, but these new settings make things much easier to understand and implement. The three default sections here are: “Important & unread,” “Starred,” and “Everything else” — but there’s an option to add a fourth, which you should. You should create a new label that you can quickly tag emails with. For example, I chose “A1″ since “A” shows up first in the Labels drop down menu. Set this section (which is actually the second section) to show emails with that label. → Read More
In May 2009, I wrote a post speculating about something called “Magic Inbox.” What was so special about it? It was a reference found in the code of Gmail by the blog Google Operating System, and appeared to point to a new Gmail feature that would sort your email with the help of your social connections. Many of us wondered if such a feature would be launching soon. But that never happened. Well, until tonight, that is. Magic Inbox is the new Gmail Priority Inbox.
Gmail Product Director Keith Coleman made that revelation during our meeting with him last week to discuss the new Priority Inbox. Magic Inbox had been in testing at Google for a long, long time leading up to this launch. “We went through so many versions of this,” Coleman said. In fact, Coleman noted that the idea to prioritze email based on who you contact that most was an original idea for Gmail itself, but no one could nail the combination of user interface and features. Obviously now, they think they have. → Read More
Email overload has finally met its match. Tomorrow, Gmail is rolling out a new feature called Priority Inbox that is going to be a Godsend for those of you who dread opening your email. In short, Google has built a system that figures out which of your messages are important, and presents them at the top of the screen so you don’t miss them. The rest of your messages are still there, but you don’t have to dig through dozens of newsletters and confirmations to find the diamonds in rough.
The beauty of the system lies in its simplicity — it’s nearly as easy as Gmail’s one click spam filter. There’s almost no setup: once it’s activated on your account, you’ll see a prompt asking you if you want to enable Priority Inbox. You can choose from a few options (the order of your various inboxes and if there are any contacts you’d like to always mark ‘Important’) but don’t have to setup any rules or ‘teach’ Gmail what you want it to mark important. It just works, at least most of the time. → Read More
Google doesn’t have a native app for Gmail on the iPhone. I know, it sucks. Thankfully, their mobile Safari-optimized version is pretty damn good. But it’s not perfect. And they’re working to make it better.
This morning, I loaded up the mobile version of the site on my iPhone as was greeted by a shiny new version. The entire look and feel has been mildly revamped: everything is a slightly darker blue hue, and the buttons are now more rounded. But more significantly, buttons have been shifted around — and one key one has been removed altogether. → Read More
I’d wager that you’d be hard-pressed to find an iPhone user that doesn’t use Gmail on the device. And yet, it’s an awkward relationship. Why? Because Gmail run through the iPhone’s native mail client is a crippled experience. Set aside for a second that you cannot star anything (well, aside from moving an email to the “Starred” folder, which is ridiculous), more importantly, there is no push support. This means you cannot get your email in realtime. Instead, you have to ping Gmail’s servers (either in set intervals or manually). Both Yahoo Mail and MobileMe mail have full push support. It’s ridiculous. Google finally made a move to fix that today. Well, sort of.
With the latest version of their Google Mobile App, you can set up your iPhone to receive Push Notifications each time you get a new Gmail message or when you have a Google Calendar alert. No, Push Notifications on the iPhone aren’t technically the same as full push support for mail, but it will do. Essentially, you’ll now be getting a notification when a new message comes in and this will alert you to open your Mail app and retrieve it. It’s two more steps than regular push would require, but whatever. → Read More
While Google is testing search results that update as you type on its own, startup CloudMagic is bringing that functionality to Gmail and Google Apps – and other cloud-based services in the near future – by means of a Firefox and Chrome browser extension.
Installing the extension results in an extra search box in your Gmail interface that allows you to rapidly search for anything in your inbox, with results updating as you type and the ability to preview messages from a thread in a tab or open entire conversations with a single click. → Read More
I would estimate I spend roughly 20 percent of any given day in Gmail. So naturally, I want a way to spend more time looking at the Gmail logo. Luckily Paul Truong, a “creative technologist” (I want that job) at Google spent his own 20 percent time coming up with a way.
Truong has made a new HTML5-based game called Galactic Inbox. When you start it up, a little Gmail logo envelope guy pops out of a “20% Projects Lab” and starts flying. Essentially, he’s a spaceship and can shoot objects coming his way. It’s simple, but fun. → Read More
Gmail is a great product; easily one of my favorites on the web. But it has an Achilles heel — well, actually it’s more like a bum leg: Contacts. Despite a solid contact area being a vital part of pretty much every email and productivity service, Gmail’s is awful. Or, it was awful. Today it’s getting a lot better.
Starting today, Google is rolling out its latest version of Gmail to users around the world. As you can see, it has been slightly redesigned to more prominently display both Contacts and Tasks. While you click on the link to go to the new Contacts area, you’ll notice that Gmail’s left sidebar transforms to show you labels for your various contacts. And the contacts themselves in the main view are now one big stream of names and email addresses — it looks a lot more like Gmail. → Read More
While I occasionally rag on Google Apps for downtime, the fact of the matter is that some of them are getting pretty amazing. The crown jewel is still, of course, Gmail. It’s so good that I haven’t regularly used a desktop email client in years. But despite that fact, there have still been a few things I’ve always missed, such as simple drag-and-drop to insert images into messages. Tonight, that changes.
As Google has just announced on its Gmail blog, the ability to drag images into messages has been added to Gmail. There is no Labs feature to enable, it just works — well, provided you’re using Chrome. (You see the benefit of developing your own browser?) You can simply click on any image on your computer, drag it into your browser window, drop it into the body area of your Gmail email, and it’s instantly inserted in the message. → Read More
Since October 19, 2005, Gmail has been known as “Google Mail” in the UK. The means that everyone who signed up since that point was forced to use the cumbersome @googlemail.com address rather than a @gmail.com one. But soon, Gmail is going on a UK comeback tour. And the better news: all those with @googlemail.com addresses can “upgrade” to a gmail.com one.
So why the change? Well, initially Google had to stop using Gmail in the UK because of a legal dispute. As they explain here, it was a trademark issue. Rather than offer no service to UK users, Google made the call to go with Google Mail while it fought for the Gmail name. “We are still working with the courts and trademark office to protect our ability to use the Gmail name, but in the meantime, we want you to have an email address you can rely on,” they wrote at the time. → Read More
If you live in Gmail all day, you’re almost certainly going to want to activate a new feature that just want live in labs: Gmail Sneak Peek. The feature, as the name suggests, allows you to get a preview of the message you’ve currently got selected, without actually opening it (it reminds me a bit of the preview pane you get in Mac OS X when you hit the spacebar).
After activating Sneak Peak in Labs, either right click on a message or use the handy keyboard shortcut ‘h’, and the preview pane will pop up. You probably won’t be able to see the entire message you’re looking at, but it’s definitely enough to figure out if the message is important or if it should promptly be sent to your archive. You can use the ‘j’ and ‘k’ shortcuts to scroll through your list of messages, looking at a preview of each. My only gripe (and it’s a fairly significant one) is what Sneak Peek does when you actually act on a message. → Read More
I’ve been a happy Gmail user for years, and never had any complaints about its ability to separate legitimate emails from spam. Nevertheless, I’ve made a habit out of regularly checking my spam folder out of fear of missing important emails, even though I used to have to recover only one or maybe two messages per month. Now I’m glad I made a habit out of doing that.
Since about a week and a half ago, I’ve noticed that legitimate emails are being marked as spam at increasing rates, to the degree where I have to check my spam folder as often as my regular inbox in order not to miss breaking news from sources or via our contact page, or even emails from TechCrunch colleagues. → Read More
This morning, Gmail users are getting one more weapon in the fight against phishers and malware. In a blog post, Google has announced that it is adding a new feature that alerts users when the service detects “suspicious account activity”. Namely, Gmail will now give users a warning if it detects that they’re accessing their accounts from two different geographic regions within a short amount of time (credit cards often do the same thing).
The feature takes advantage of the IP tracking that Google launched back in July 2008, which lets users see the last few IP addresses to access their account. This doesn’t provide amazing accuracy (in the US it only displays what state you’re in), but it should at least help users detect attacks from across the country or abroad. → Read More
During the Behind the Scenes of Gmail panel today at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, team member Jonathan Perlow made a revelation that will be a huge relief to power Gmail users: things will soon get a lot faster.
When addressing the question, “why is Gmail slow?,” Perlow asked the audience to raise their hands if they thought Gmail was too slow. A solid number of people raised their hands. Perlow said that the reason everyone didn’t is because slowness is really only an issue for power users of the service — those with hundreds of thousands or even millions of messages. As someone approaching 100% usage of my Gmail inbox, I know this problem well. → Read More
Today at the Gmail Behind The Scenes panel at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, key team members of the Gmail team revealed the true secret of the service: Shit umbrellas.
Product manager Todd Jackson made the humorous revelation when explaining how the Gmail team works as a group of about 100 people, the vast majority of which are engineers. “You can either be a shit funnel or a shit umbrella,” Jackson says. → Read More
Earlier this week, we reported on a number of new security enhancements that we expect Gmail to launch in the next few days, including oAuth support. It looks like we were right: a small startup called Etacts, which launched last month, has just implemented oAuth for Gmail IMAP accounts, allowing Etacts to securely tap into your email without the security risks associated with handing over your Gmail password. This appears to be the first public implementation of Gmail IMAP oAuth support. For email services, this is a big deal. We expect Google to announce support for the new feature more broadly this week.
So why does this matter? Etacts is a powerful tool for making sure you keep in touch with the friends, family, and business associates that are important to you. But at launch, it came with one significant flaw: it required users to hand over their Gmail account passwords (without them, the service wouldn’t be able to automatically pull in your new email). Even though Etacts seems trustworthy, handing over a password carries risks — if the service was ever hacked, there’s a small chance your password could have been compromised. With oAuth, this isn’t an issue. → Read More
If your Gmail account is down or consistently throwing random errors your way, like my account is right now, note that it isn’t just you. According to the Apps Status Dashboard, a “significant subset of users” started running into trouble at around 9:45 AM Pacific Time.
At 11:34 PM, Google posted an update, saying that Google Mail service had been restored for some users, and that it expected a resolution for all users “within the next 4 hours” (estimate). → Read More
Gmail is known for launching a plethora of nifty little features through Labs that make the email platform more attractive and easy to use. In total, Gmail Labs has 60 features that can be turned on and off and is steadily adding more enhancements. Yesterday, Google announced that six features will be graduating from Labs and will become regular features of Gmail. And Google will also be retiring five features. The decisions were made based on usage and user feedback. Here are the graduating and retiring features: → Read More
