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Official Gmail Blog: labs
Official Gmail Blog
News, tips and tricks from Google's Gmail team and friends.
3 Labs graduations, 1 retirement
May 31, 2011
Posted by Maciek Nowakowski, Associate Product Manager
Today we’re excited to graduate three more features from the experimental testing ground of Gmail Labs. Superstars, Nested Labels, and Advanced IMAP Controls are now first-class citizens in the Gmail world, thanks largely to your feedback. We’re also retiring the
Google Search box lab
which was redundant with the “Search the Web” button that’s already in Gmail.
Superstars
Superstars, one of the most popular Labs features, provides different types of stars in addition to Gmail’s basic one. You can assign a certain star to special conversations and use another as a visual reminder that you need to follow-up on a message later. You can now choose your own set of stars from
Settings
:
Once you’ve done that, the stars will rotate with each consecutive click on the star icon.
Nested Labels
Labels are a great way of organizing your email; nested labels give you the ability to organize labels hierarchically. Starting today, nested labels are enabled for everyone along with a couple of small improvements such as a sticky collapse/expand state and better editing options.
To start using them, you can either create a new sub-label from the dropdown menu on the left hand side or just move an existing label under another one using the edit option:
Advanced IMAP Controls
This Labs feature provided a very useful set of advanced controls for those of you who access Gmail through IMAP clients (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, or your iPhone’s native mail app). Now it’s easier to take advantage of features like syncing only selected labels or limiting the folder size limit to improve your IMAP experience.
True to the
original spirit of Gmail Labs
, we’ll continue to add new features, graduate some, and retire others, so keep trying them out and
sending us your feedback
.
New in Labs: Background Send
April 25, 2011
Posted by Patrick Doyle, Software Engineer
We’re always looking for ways to make Gmail faster. One of the most common delays happens after you hit that “Send” button, when you’re waiting patiently for a couple seconds for Gmail to send your message. If you send a lot of email, that can add up to a lot of lost time.
To help give you that time back, there’s a new feature in Gmail Labs called Background Send. Once you turn it on from the
Labs tab in Settings
, you can get on with what you’re doing while Gmail quietly sends off your mail in the background. You can keep reading your inbox, compose new messages, chat with people — all the things you’d usually do. You can even send more than one message in the background at the same time.
If anything goes wrong (maybe you got that email address wrong, or maybe your connection had a hiccup), you’ll see a warning message that prompts you to go back and fix the issue or try again later.
The “Send errror” message will stay around until you decide to fix things, so you don’t have to stop whatever you’re doing right away. The only catch is that you should wait for your mail to finish sending before you close Gmail or shut down your computer. If messages are still being sent in the background when you shut down,
your messages are probably going to be lost
. You’ll know you’re good to go when you see a message like this:
We’ve been trying out Background Send for a while here at Google, and we like it a lot. We hope you like it too, and we hope it gives you back a little bit of your day!
“Don't forget Bob” and “Got the wrong Bob?” graduate from Labs
April 13, 2011
Posted by Assaf Ben-David, Software Engineering Intern, Israel
“
Don’t forget Bob
” and “
Got the wrong Bob
?” are two Gmail Labs features that help prevent you from making two common mistakes: forgetting to include someone on an email, and sending a message to the wrong person with a similar name to the person you meant to email — like emailing Bob (your boss) instead of Bob (your friend).
We’ve received quite a bit of positive feedback from people who avoided some embarrassing situations thanks to these features. And today, we’re excited to graduate them from Gmail Labs and start turning them on for everyone (they should start working in all Gmail accounts over the next day or so). Once that happens, as you type in your recipients, Gmail will automatically make suggestions based on the groups of people you email most often. When you see a suggestion to add a person you’ve forgotten, all you have to do is click on their name to add them.
Similarly, if you click on a suggestion to replace a mistakenly added recipient, the proverbial “wrong Bob” will be replaced by the right one.
We hope these suggestions help you avoid some sticky situations — before you hit send. As you compose messages and see these features in actions, let us know what you think by tweeting @gmail with your ideas and impressions or leaving a message in the
Gmail Help forum
.
New in Labs: Unread message icon
January 25, 2011
Posted by Manu Cornet, Software Engineer
When you’re visiting sites other than Gmail, it’s easy to find out how many unread messages are in your inbox by glancing at the title of your Gmail tab or window. However, if you have a ton of tabs open, or if you use
Chrome’s “Pin Tab”
feature that hides everything except the tab’s icon, it can be tricky to figure out without switching tabs.
If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, you may like the new Unread message icon we just added to Gmail Labs. It embeds the number of unread messages you have right into the Gmail icon itself, like this:
To turn it on, go to the
Labs tab in Settings
, enable this lab, and click the “Save Changes” button at the very bottom of the page. Note that it’ll only works in Chrome (version 6 and above) and Firefox (version 2 and above).
Find Labs with search-as-you-type
January 19, 2011
Posted by Greg Bullock, Software Engineer
Have you ever found it just a little bit tricky to find what you were looking for on the
Gmail Labs Settings page
? Scrolling was ok when there were a handful of Labs, but now that there are over 50 it’s another story. A lunchtime discussion made us realize that having to rely on the browser’s search function or endless scrolling makes it hard to find the Labs features you want. So another Gmail engineer named Manu and I decided take an afternoon and address this. The result is an addition to the Settings page which filters the visible Labs as you type.
You can also link directly to the search results (e.g.
http://mail.google.com/mail#settings/labs/
video
) if you’d like.
New in Labs: Smart mute and easier ways to unmute
December 1, 2010
Posted by Bruce DiBello, Software Engineer
If you subscribe to a lot of mailing lists and like to keep an empty inbox,
muting
(or preventing a conversation from re-entering your inbox) is an essential feature. We just made a few changes that should make muting even better.
First up is “Smart Mute,” a new Gmail Labs feature that helps solve the problem of conversations that just won’t die. You know the ones I’m talking about: those emails with 10+ people cc’d where everyone replies all, but you lost interest five emails ago. The current mute behavior doesn’t do well in these situations since the messages are addressed to you. You end up with muted messages in your inbox, and the only way to prevent these emails from coming back to your inbox has been to create a custom filter for a specific conversation.
If you enable “Smart Mute” from the
Labs tab in Gmail Settings
, muted conversations will only appear in your inbox if a new message in the conversation is addressed to you and no one else, or a new email in the conversation adds you to the “To” or “Cc” line. Once you enable Smart Mute, mute behavior will change across all versions of Gmail: web, mobile, Android, etc. Try it out and
let us know
what you think.
Since you’ll likely be muting more than ever, we also added easier ways to unmute muted conversations. Previously, the only way to unmute a conversation was to move it to your inbox -- not super intuitive and useless if the conversation was already in your inbox. Now there are two new ways to unmute a conversation. The first is through an "Unmute" option in the "More actions" menu. You’ll see this when you view or select a muted conversation.
If you’re viewing a muted conversation, you’ll see the second new way to unmute: the "Muted" label next to the subject line now behaves just like all other labels. Clicking on the "X" will remove the Muted label and unmute the conversation.
Hopefully these changes will make it easier to mute and unmute conversations.
New in Labs: Recently used emoji
November 30, 2010
Posted by Darren Lewis, Software Engineer
When we added
emoticons in Gmail
, you responded with a nice big smile
, but then you asked for more. So we added
hundreds more emoticons
through Gmail Labs. “But alas!” you cried. “How can I ever keep up with so many different choices?
I am overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of emotion
, amusement
, and cute animals
that Gmail has to offer." Well, don’t despair, fine purveyor of emoticons. There is now a solution: “Recently Used Emoji” in Gmail Labs, which keeps track of the ten most recent emoticons you’ve used, and saves them for easy access. To turn it on, just visit the
Labs tab of Gmail Settings
.
No more searching through dozens of cat faces for the one that says, “I miss you, but I’m still ambivalent about our weekend plans.” You can now triumph over the plethora of emoticons, and easily add a pile of emotion to any email that you choose —
let us know
how it goes.
New in Labs: Auto-advance to the next conversation
October 26, 2010
Posted by Bruce DiBello, Software Engineer
Today, whenever you open an email in your Gmail inbox and then archive or delete it, you’re taken back to your inbox.
Many
of
you
have
asked
for the ability to instead go to the next conversation. Keyboard ninjas will already be familiar with the “]” and “[“
keyboard shortcuts
for archiving and going to the next/previous conversation. For everyone else (and for people who frequently mute or delete conversations rather than archive them) we’re offering a new feature in Gmail Labs called “Auto-advance,” which automatically opens the next conversation after you archive/delete/mute the one you’re on.
To get started with “Auto-advance” go to the
Labs tab in Settings
, enable it, and click the “Save changes” button. By default, “Auto-advance” will advance to the previous (older) conversation in your inbox -- perfect for people who read their newest mail first. If you usually read your oldest email first and would rather advance to the next (newer) conversation, you can change the direction from the
General Settings tab
.
Hopefully this will save you some time the next time you have to deal with a crowded inbox. Try it out and
let us know
what you think.
New in Labs: Video chat enhancements
September 16, 2010
Posted by Serge Lachapelle, Product Manager
If you use video chat in Gmail, you might be interested in a new Labs feature we just rolled out that allows you to preview new video chat features before they're turned on for everyone. Visit the
Gmail Labs tab under Settings
, turn on "Video chat enhancements," and right away, you'll see higher resolution video and a bigger video chat window.
The higher resolution video uses a new playback mechanism which enables widescreen VGA and frees up valuable resources on your computer. For it to work, both you and the person you're chatting with will need to have the lab turned on. Remember that you can always revert to standard video chat by disabling the lab.
We plan to add more video chat enhancements to this lab in the future, so if you have it on you'll automatically get those too. Feel free to post your comments or report any issues you encounter in the
video chat forum
(we also follow #googlevideochat on Twitter).
New in Labs: Find docs and sites quickly with Apps Search
August 18, 2010
Posted by Bram Moolenaar, Software Engineer
Where is that presentation? Was it attached to an email? Or in Google Docs? If you’re not sure, you may end up searching several places with the same query in order to find it. With the new “Apps Search” lab, we just made that all a bit simpler.
Once you enable it from the
Gmail Labs tab under Settings
, the “Search Mail” button in Gmail will say “Search Mail and Docs” instead, and your search results will include matching documents and sites in addition to email messages.
We also added “Did you mean?” style suggestions, for those of us who make mistakes (who doesn’t?):
You may notice that mail results show up just as fast as before while non-mail results may take a tiny bit longer. That way, if you’re just looking for an email, having this lab enabled won’t slow you down.
The paint is still wet and we plan to make further improvements the coming months, so be sure to
let us know
if you have any feedback.
Google Maps previews in Gmail and Google Buzz
June 7, 2010
Posted by Mark Knichel, Software Engineer
I often receive emails containing addresses in them — where to meet for dinner, the location of my friend's new apartment, etc. To find out where these places actually are, I have to copy the address, open up
Google Maps
, and paste it in. Today, we're making it easier to see maps of all the addresses you receive in Gmail and Google Buzz.
Enable "Google Maps previews in mail" from the
Gmail Labs tab under Settings
, and any time you receive an address or a Google Maps link in an email, a preview will appear containing an interactive Google Map of that location. Any Google Maps URL will work, but we currently only extract US addresses (we're working on making addresses around the world work).
Additionally, when you paste a Google Maps link into the post box in Google Buzz, it'll automatically fetch an image preview of that location that you can associate with your post.
Please
let us know
if you have any feedback.
New in Labs: Move the attachment and other icon column
May 25, 2010
Posted by Greg Bullock, Software Engineer
The icon column in Gmail helps to easily distinguish the various types of items in your inbox (e.g. messages with attachments, chats, calendar invitations, Buzz posts, and more). It's usually all the way over on the right of the screen, but with screen sizes becoming increasingly wider, I chose to make a very modest addition to Gmail Labs to try and give these icons greater visibility.
I found it much more useful to have this column situated on the far left of my inbox -- and it turns out that many of my colleagues did too.
If you’d like try out "Move Icon Column," simply visit the
Labs tab under Gmail Settings
, find this new Lab in the list, hit enable, and then save. It’s not big and it’s not clever but hopefully this lab might just be helpful for you too; it's the little things in life after all.
New in Labs: Nested Labels and Message Sneak Peek
April 8, 2010
Posted by Manu Cornet, Software Engineer
Labels are more flexible than folders because a given email can have several labels but can't be in several folders at the same time. A highly requested feature for labels, though, comes from the world of folders: the ability to organize labels hierarchically.
If you think this might be useful to you, go to the
Gmail Labs tab under Settings
, look for "
Nested Labels
," enable it and click "Save." You'll then need to name your label with slashes (/) to make it the child of another. For example, let's say you wanted to create a simple hierarchy with a "Home" label, and inside it a "Family" and a "Vacation" label. Just create three labels with the following names:
Home
Home/Family
Home/Vacation
You can then create "Home/Family/Kids," "Home/Pets," etc., to get something like the screenshot on the left. If you had the parent label "Home" before you don't have to create it from scratch.
You can create complex hierarchies of labels if that's the way you like to organize your mail, and you can expand/collapse labels to save space. You'll always be able to tell whether a given label contains unread messages in its collapsed child labels by looking at whether it's bold or not.
Please note that this lab doesn't play nicely with the "Hide Read Labels" lab. You might not get exactly what you expect if you have both labs enabled; for example, the collapse/expand icons won't always appear when they should.
Another highly requested feature is the ability to preview messages to get a glimpse on what they contain and maybe take immediate action without opening them.
This is exactly what "
Message Sneak Peek
" does. After you turn it on, right-clicking on a line in your inbox shows a preview pane with the message in it.
You can also use keyboard shortcuts for a faster sneak-peeking flow (enable keyboard shortcuts in Settings first if you haven't done so): hit 'h' to open a sneak peek card, then navigate with 'j' and 'k,' and dismiss the current card by pressing "Escape." Messages you peak at will stay unread (or it wouldn't really be a sneak peek, would it?).
Happy nesting and peeking!
Smart Rescheduler in Google Calendar Labs
March 18, 2010
Posted by David Marmaros, Software Engineer
As you can imagine, those of us on the Google Calendar team spend a lot of time thinking about scheduling. We regularly talk to people who schedule and reschedule
a lot
of meetings: administrative assistants. Talking to them, we understand just how much time they spend looking at schedules, investigating other people's calendars, finding replacement conference rooms and rescheduling conflicts. And then some manager's travel plans change and everything starts over again.
If you're searching for something on the web, you don't just start randomly visiting pages looking for relevant content, you use a search engine. So we decided to apply some of Google's search experience to the problem of scheduling. We experimented with using ranking algorithms to return the most relevant meeting times based on specified criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times.
Today we're launching the result of that experiment, a gadget called Smart Rescheduler, in
Google Calendar Labs
. Once you turn it on, just select an event you'd like to reschedule, then click "Find a new time...":
You'll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby. This process is 100% automated — no Google employees are doing any work behind the scenes. You can refine the results by marking people as optional, changing the meeting duration, ignoring certain conflicts, or specifying the earliest and latest times you'll accept. The results will immediately update to reflect your new requirements.
This feature is still experimental, so we'd love your
ideas and feedback
. Of course, we can't make meetings more interesting, but we can try to save you frustration leading up to them.
3 new Calendar Labs
March 10, 2010
Posted by Grace Kwak, Product Manager
Today, we're happy to announce three new features in Calendar Labs. To try them out, just go to the
Labs tab under Calendar Settings
.
1. Event flair
by Dave Marmaros
Want a little airplane icon next to information about your upcoming flight? Or stars next to meetings with your boss? This experiment lets you choose from forty different icons and add one to each Calendar event. Even better, if you invite people to your events, they'll be able to see the icon you added too. After you enable this feature, click on an event and look for the "Event flair" gadget to activate.
2. Gentle reminders
by Sorin Mocanu
If you keep Google Calendar open all day long, you probably end up seeing quite a few reminders every day. Browser alerts are okay, but I tried to find a way for Calendar notifications to integrate smoothly with everything else.
Turn on "Gentle Reminders," and when you get a notification, the title of your Calendar window or tab will start blinking and the event details will stay in Calendar.
If you're using this lab in a supported browser (currently Google Chrome for Windows and Google Chrome beta for Linux), you'll also have the option to get your reminders in the next generation of floating desktop notifications:
After you enable this feature, you can configure notification options on the Settings page.
3. Automatically declining events
by Lucia Fedorova and Miguel García
Have you ever checked your calendar and noticed that someone scheduled a really important meeting during your vacation or at a time when you're not available? Now there's a way to automatically decline events when you're not around. Turn on "Automatically declining events," block off times when you're unavailable, and event invitations during this period will get automatically declined.
New in Labs: Refresh POP accounts
March 8, 2010
Posted by Emmanuel Pellereau, Software Engineer
My little sister recently setup her Gmail account to
retrieve messages
from her school address, so she can check all of her email accounts in one place. She no longer has to constantly log in to two email programs, and she likes using Gmail's powerful interface for all her mail.
However, sometimes she knows an email has already been sent to her school address, and she just can't wait for the next scheduled fetch to have it show up in her Gmail inbox. As any big brother would, I tried to solve this issue for her and millions of Gmail users.
Turn on "Refresh POP accounts" from the
Labs tab
under Settings, and the refresh link at the top of your inbox will not only update your inbox with your new Gmail messages, it will also fetch messages from any other accounts which you have set up.
Try it out, and
let us know
if you have any feedback.
Gmail Labs graduation and retirement
February 24, 2010
Posted by Mark Knichel, Software Engineer
We
launched Gmail Labs
over a year and a half ago as a playground where engineers can come up with new features and let your input help decide which are good ideas and which don't quite work out. Any engineer at Google can come up with a feature, code it, and launch it quickly to tens of millions of users.
Labs started out with 13 features and quickly grew to 60, with even more on the way. We've received countless comments and kept an eye on our stats: some of these experimental features were adopted by millions and others trickled along with little usage. A couple have already graduated from Labs and we've already retired one: Tasks was the first to
become a regular part of Gmail
, Right-side Labels was retired when we
updated the way labels work
, and Offline Gmail
graduated
a couple months back. Today, true to the original intent of Gmail Labs, we're graduating six more features and retiring five.
Graduating:
Search Autocomplete
Go To Label
Forgotten Attachment Detector
YouTube Previews
Custom Label Colors
Vacation Dates
Retiring:
Muzzle
Fixed Width Font
Email Addict
Location in Signature
Random Signature
These decisions were made based based mainly on usage, taking feature polish and your feedback into account. We've also tweaked some of the graduating features to improve them before making them default Gmail features. For example, we've combined Go To Label with Search Autocomplete, making it easier than ever for you to find what you're looking for.
Search Autocomplete and Go To Label
Start typing in the Gmail search box (English only for now), and Gmail suggests terms that might help you find what you're looking for — from contact names to labels and
advanced search operators
.
We've integrated Go To Label into this search box as well. If you have
keyboard shortcuts
turned on, type "g" then "l" and instead of getting the old "Go to label" pop-up, you'll be in the search box with the "label:" operator filled in for you. Start typing the label you want to go to, and autocomplete will take it from there. All you have to do is hit enter. If you want to send your cursor to the blank search field, the keyboard shortcut "/" will do it.
Forgotten Attachment Detector
From time to time, we all forget to attach a file and sheepishly send another email with the forgotten attachment. To help save you from that embarrassment, Gmail looks for phrases in your email that suggest you meant to attach a file and alerts you if it looks like you forgot an attachment.
YouTube Previews
If you're like me, your friends probably often email you links to YouTube videos. Instead of having to click on the link and wait for a new window to load before you can watch the video, Gmail now shows YouTube previews right below the message. All you have to do is click the play button and enjoy.
Custom Label Colors
Why settle for a restrictive palette when you can choose from over 4000 possible color combinations to help distinguish and organize your labels? Just click on "Add custom color" from the regular labels interface.
Vacation Dates
If you specify which dates you'll be away in advance, you won't have to remember to turn on the
vacation responder
when when you're actually on vacation. Set your dates in advance, and let Gmail do the rest.
Retiring features is always a tough decision — we invest in building and maintaining them and we realize some of you are probably fans of some of Gmail's lesser-used features. But Labs are experimental features, and from time to time they may break (that's why there's a quick way to
disable
them), or even disappear. Over the next few days, you'll see Muzzle, Fixed Width Font, Email Addict, Location in Signature, and Random Signature stop working and disappear from the Labs tab.
We'll keep working on new Labs to help make your Gmail experience even better, and we'll continue to graduate successful features and retire the ones that don’t work out to make room for new ones. Thank you to all the engineers who have worked on Labs features — especially Bruce, Darick, Jon (the intern), Ibrahim, Chris, Keith, Chad, Michael, and Marco! Please continue to send us
feedback
and remember that you vote for your favorite Labs features by using them and leaving comments.
Improved Google Search in Labs
February 2, 2010
Posted by Adam de Boor, Software Engineer
Hello again. I've been taking advantage of my 20% time to make some improvements in the
Google Search lab I told you about
last April. For starters, I've hooked up a bunch of Google's most popular
search features
, including:
Dictionary definition
s: use a keyword like "define" in English and you'll see the first definition of the word, with a link to the dictionary from which it came.
Spelling corrections
: if you mistype something in your search, Google’s spell checking software will automatically ask if you meant a more common spelling of that word (especially helpful when looking up a new word).
Calculations
: type in an arithmetic expression and you'll get the result. In this case the "Paste result" option from the result's pop-up menu will actually paste the result of the computation.
Local results
: you can search for a particular place or for things near a particular place (map results will show up in a few weeks — they're a little broken by our recent switch to use https). The "More info" link will take you to the place page.
Weather
: just type "weather" followed by the city and state, zip code, or city and country.
News
: if your query matches something in the news, we'll show you one hit and an indication of how many related articles there are, with a link to go see them.
In addition, you can now use this Labs feature in any
available Gmail language
and you'll get search results that match your preferred language.
Finally, as
some folks have already noticed
, I added a search button to the toolbar when you're composing a message:
If you've got text selected when you click it, Gmail will search for that text. If you don't have text selected, you'll just get a search box where you can start typing.
That's all for this installment. As always, we welcome your
feedback
.
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