Some of you may be familiar with Google labs and some may not. Anyway, Google labs used to be the play ground for the developers to create new web applications which are fun and useful. Anyway, Google decided to close it’s doors in July this year. Luckily, they are not closing some in-project labs such as Gmail labs. The features Gmail Labs offer are extremely useful and fun. I am discussing some lab projects I’ve been using and which I found helpful.
Activating Gmail labs
First go to the website www.googlelabs.com , then on the right side under the title ‘Other experiments at Google’, click on Gmail labs link. Sign in to your Gmail account (if you haven’t already) you’ll see a list of lab projects available with a short description about each one, ‘Enable’ the features you want to use and don’t forget to click ‘Save Changes’ button located at the bottom of the page. Come back and ‘Disable’ any feature if you didn’t liked it.
Inbox Preview : This isn't much. It just gives a preview of your inbox as it is loading your Gmail account. It may be good for people with low internet speed connections. Though you can click or view an email, you can at least know whether there are any new mails. Anyway, even for people with low internet connection Gmail have a ‘Basic html version’. I use it because it quickly kills our curiosity to find out who have sent us mails lately :)
Undo Send : This is a great option. Though you may not need it most of the times it is a good thing to be ‘Enabled’, just in case. With this option enable you can cancel a mail from being sent while it’s in ‘Sending’ status and even you’ve got the power to ‘Undo’ an email sent within in a few seconds after you’ve send it. As I said you may not need this for most of the time, but if you make a mistake in future you wouldn’t have to regret if you have this thing turned ON.
Authentication icon for verified senders : Currently they have this only with PayPal and eBay. But still, it is a good thing to be enabled since there are so many phishers out there and it would be good if you take an extra precaution. Anyway, don’t trust to this icon alone before you click some important links from those emails!
Background send : This will be extremely useful for users with slow connections. This option let you do other tasks while a mail is sending in the background so that you don’t have sit and stare at the computer until the mails are sent. This is useful especially when you’re accessing web from a PC by connecting you phone with GPRS.
Mail Goggles : This is a pretty cool and interesting app. It’s sort of a CAPTCHA thing. Extremely useful for people who works late nights (or who works after getting drunk or something). Before sending your email you would have to solve some simple math problems so that the computer can know that you’re good to go! With this and ‘undo’ option enabled you won’t have to regret sending false emails in future!
Mark as Read Button : Sometimes, the email subject says it all! With this feature enabled you can just mark any mail ‘Read’ so you don’t have to open them and come back. This is a useful thing, especially if you’ve got lots and lots of unread emails in your account.
Multiple Inboxes : With this feature enabled, you’ll have multiple inboxes. You can your own inbox of ‘starred’ items or any other search term. Didn’t do much for me, you can try it out though!
Right-side chat : Wanna change the layout? Get your chat box to right side. Doesn’t do much, yet who wouldn’t like a change?
NOTE: Google call these features as ‘Crazy Experimental stuff’, so whenever you get some troubles with these lab features, i.e. If a lab feature breaks and you have trouble loading your inbox go to https://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0 .
Lab is a great collection of useful products. There are lab features available for YouTube and other Google products as well. You might wanna checkout some YouTube lab projects like html5, feather etc. They’re really awesome an I bet you’ll love them.
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