Gmail Labs Lets Users Experiment With 13 New Features

D Ninja writes "Yesterday, Google released Gmail Labs, which allows Gmail developers to decide what to include in the next feature releases of Gmail based on user feedback. As ZDNet has pointed out, essentially users are guinea pigs for these new features. Participants will vote on their favorite new features, and the ones that are voted the highest will stick around and the ones that are least popular will disappear." Reader physman_wiu points out an article at the BBC about the experiments on offer, writing: "Some of the features are really nice — like the option to use additional star icons, mouse gestures, and custom keyboard shortcuts. Others ... well, let's just say Old Snakey made it in."

HTML signatures

[an.echte.trilingue (1063180)]

All I want for Christmas is rich text (links, images) in my gmail signature... third party extensions do this but they are are a PITA

Re:HTML signatures

[Slorv (841945)]

>All I want for Christmas is rich text (links,
>images) in my gmail signature...

Fine, as long as they also enable me to filter out images and "rich" formatting.

Re:HTML signatures

[smallfries (601545)]

You should try asking them. All I wanted for Christmas was group chat and now I seem to be in some sort of group chat beta. While most of my friends can't initiate group chats I've got some extra icons in my user interface that lets me set them up. It's pretty cool, and I'm not sure how I got into it other than I sent some feedback using the form buried in the gmail help and it magically appeared.

So who know, if you ask for it you might just get it.

Re:

[jwpeterson (1299277)]

I thought group chat has been available to everyone for a while now... From an internal chat window I just go to Options -> Group Chat. My friends can all do this to.

Re:HTML signatures

[Yvanhoe (564877)]

Noooo! Just no...

Re:HTML signatures

[by Anonymous Coward]

All I want for Christmas is rich text (links, images) in my gmail signature.

Most of the people you communicate with will be grateful as long as gmail does not offer that feature.

Re:HTML signatures

[hansamurai (907719)]

Are you the guy at work using Outlook's Spring Green background with bright red font color and a 10 line signature? Yeah, just to let you know, I filter your email to plain text.

Re:HTML signatures

[R2.0 (532027)]

You remind me of the secretary's at a previous employer. When they discovered Powerpoint in about 2000, we would get emails with a Powerpoint attachment whose content included things like "The staff meeting has been postponed" or "The traffic on I83 is really bad", replete with colors, animations, and 20 different fonts. The problem was that about 1/2 of the staff worked remotely over dial-up, and attempting to open one of these missives would crash Outlook, Windows, and lock up the processor, requiring a reboot. And there was no escape -0 as soon as you opened Outlook it would attempt to download, and lock up before one was able to go offline and delete the bastard.

In summary, KNOCK IT OFF - no one likes those dumbass signatures; your regular correspondents are simply to polite to tell you.

Re:HTML signatures

[Nimey (114278)]

The lot of you were equally responsible for never saying anything to the dumbass secretary or her boss.

Oh, BBC, you make it so easy.

[by Anonymous Coward]

Others ... well, let's just say Old Snakey made it in.

That's what she said.

Whats wrong with Old Snakey?

[Miladinoski (1280850)]

Its a great way to waste time while you're "working"

Non-English?

[by Anonymous Coward]

1) Doesn't work unless you use GMail in English.
2) Doesn't work unless you use Firefox 2 or IE 7.

Sorry, folks... work on it a bit more!

Re:Non-English?

[Miladinoski (1280850)]

For the first one, yes, you're right but for the second one there's a workaround: try acessing GMail with http://mail.google.com/?nocheckbrowser [google.com] . It works great on Opera 9.5 (atleast for me).

Re:Non-English?

[Le Jimmeh (1086671)]

Also works in Firefox 3 (at least the RC2 that I'm using).

Re:Non-English?

[drcagn (715012)]

Also works fine in Safari...

Re:

[Tadu (141809)]

3) Doesn't work unless you use the newest UI (ui=1, as needed for Konqi 3, simply doesn't show the option, luckily KDE 4.1 is round the corner)
There seem to have been some more features unavailable unless you happen to be located in the US (just changing the language didn't cut it), so Google isn't playing nice here...

blah

[The End Of Days (1243248)]

Google isn't playing nice here

Really? How dare they roll out their free additional features for their free product on their schedule. Don't the know everyone in the world is entitled to everything they do immediately?

It's gotta be simple to do, right? After all, you could do it in five minutes with your eyes closed and both hands jammed up your own ass to hold your head there.

Re:

[squidinkcalligraphy (558677)]

seems to work fine in ie3

Re:

[squidinkcalligraphy (558677)]

umm.. i mean ff3

Re:

[neokushan (932374)]

I don't suppose the "it's a beta" (The labs tools, not gmail itself....although that is a little ironic) line would explain why it has certain restrictions?

Google Apps likes shiney new things too!

[definate (876684)]

I have Google Apps for your domain, which I liked so much I wanted to pay for it. However, now that I have it seems I am "protected" from the bleeding edge settings.

I want to test these features, and see the bleeding edge technology.

I have selected the "Turn on new features" and "Automatically add new Google services", however it seems as though Google Apps is treated a bit like a secondary service.

Is the ad revenue generated more than me paying for the service? Are the services too different that they must use completely different infrastructure and so changes in one takes time to bring across to the other? Or, are the Google Apps aimed at people who really don't want new features and services?

Re:Google Apps likes shiney new things too!

[broothal (186066)]

> it seems as though Google Apps is treated a
> bit like a secondary service.

  On the contrary - it is a primary service which people are paying for, and as such not a place to release playground software. If you provide people a service they pay for, your prime objective is to deliver a stable service. Goofing around may cause some fun, but imagine the outcry if something in Gmail Labs broke the service that people are paying for.

> Is the ad revenue generated more than me
> paying for the service?

  Probably, but that's not the reason for labs not being available to you.

> Are the services too different that they
> must use completely different infrastructure

No.

> Or, are the Google Apps aimed at people who
> really don't want new features and services?

  No - and eventually, when a feature has proven stable and functional, it will propagate.

Re:

[definate (876684)]

Are you saying Gmail isn't stable? Because I pay am I completely restricted from new things?

I imagine the outcry from regular Gmail users would be on par.

Re:

[wtfispcloadletter (1303253)]

It's stable, but sometimes the changes take awhile to propagate. I've noticed changes appear first on my @gmail.com address then later (days or weeks) will become available on my Google Apps for Domain accounts.

If you want to play with bleeding edge new features on Gmail, get a free @gmail.com address.

If you want to complain, /. isn't the place unless you like talking to an empty void that can't do anything about it. Google is who you need to send your complaints to.

Re:

[definate (876684)]

I've noticed Google fills my "talking to an empty void" needs quite nicely. Every time I have sent a help desk email, or tried to get help, I usually get nowhere.

(The exceptions have been problems setting up Postini and trouble with the Calendar losing whole calendars)

Re:Google Apps likes shiney new things too!

[jbailey999 (146222)]

As a paying customer, you have a phone number. If they don't answer an email, phone up and ask for a supervisor and bitch. It's no different than you'd treat any other company.

(obDisclosure: I'm a Google employee, but not in the gmail department)

Re:Google Apps likes shiney new things too!

[drcagn (715012)]

From the article: Labs is now out to all English users (US and UK), and administrators using Google Apps can choose to enable Labs by checking the "Turn on new features" box in Domain Settings.

Re:

[definate (876684)]

Yeah that is done. I also have had that option turned on since it has been around, which is quite some time.

I double checked it just before, just in case though.

I also refreshed and cleared my cache and tryed to force it on using ?labs=1 (for the answers guide), but that didn't work.

Perhaps they are still rolling it out, and by tomorrow I'll get it or something.

Re:

[definate (876684)]

Yeah, I like to see new changes. I want new bells and whistles and features. I want to be able to select the ones I like and disable the ones I like, therefore voting for what would be good.

Re:

[edumacator (910819)]

Well, you could sign up for a free GMail account and then transfer your other email to that account.

I would guess you are only one of the few people who would want to see that sort of thing with Apps. Remember, Apps is for businesses, where most people aren't going to want to play around with new features until they are stable.

Fix bugs first, please.

[by Anonymous Coward]

The new features are all very nice, but I would like to see Google to fix all the bugs* in their IMAP-Implementation first.

*)
http://weblog.timaltman.com/archive/2008/02/24/gmails-buggy-imap-implementation

Re:

[swb (14022)]

So they haven't fixed the IMAP bug with Windows Mobile yet?

I was more or less set to give up my dated FreeBSD home email server in favor of a Google Apps hosted email setup, but the IMAP incompatibilities killed it for me and I went through the time-consuming exercise of rebuilding a new FreeBSD system, this time using postfix, SASL and IMAPS.

I was fairly staggered by the Windows Mobile incompatibility, it was like WTF, why aren't they fixing this and why didn't they test it?

One feature I really miss...

[bogaboga (793279)]

The ability to display a few days of my calendar at the bottom of the message text box (while typing) is what I really miss. This feature is available with Yahoo mail by default. If there are important events coming up, you see these as they scroll...sweet! I hope they will implement it.

Signature tweaks!

[bgarcia (33222)]

A small but practical improvement: automatically placing the signature before the included message in a reply.

Re:Signature tweaks!

[Doctor Crumb (737936)]

A. Because it breaks the logical order of conversation. Q. Why is top posting bad?

Seriously, reply *after* the relevant bits of what you are replying to, and remove the rest. Your emails will be far shorter, they will make sense when you read through them much later, and you will no longer be fighting the email program.

"Most people" prefer top posting because that's what Outlook does, not because it's practical, readable, or efficient.

My #1 feature

[teslatug (543527)]

I wish they'd add a direct way of importing into Gmail from some of the most used desktop clients (Eudora, Outlook, mbox). There are some utilities that claim to do this, but I don't trust them enough to give them access to my account and data. Gmail has most everything I need at this point, if they don't remove any features or don't screw up the current service, I don't see myself moving away from them.

But not conversation disabling...

[LadyBug@FI (110420)]

I'm disappointed that there is no option to disable conversations either globally or per conversation. This really sucks and shows that the Google people assume way too much on how people handle their e-mail.

For example, I regularly get a bunch of e-mails from an automated bot over which I have no control. For some reason the e-mail bot gives all sent mail the same subject line although the message contents varies. So GMail automatically decides to group these e-mails into few conversations (not one conversation but one per day or something like that). This in turn prevents me from handling these messages by tags, because tag scope is the whole conversation, not a single message.

The only solution for this is to handle these e-mails in Thunderbird via IMAP, where conversations don't exist and I can just take the messages and tag them one by one.

Data on usage habits

[sjbe (173966)]

I'm disappointed that there is no option to disable conversations either globally or per conversation. This really sucks and shows that the Google people assume way too much on how people handle their e-mail.

I agree personally on the feature request but it's interesting you say Google "assumes". Since it is a web mail service they probably have extensive data on exactly how everyone uses the Gmail. Plus they get feedback from their own use as well as from users. Perhaps it is just not a feature in high demand? Or perhaps it is a designed in "feature" kind of like Apple's one button mouse that they are disinclined to change? Who knows for sure...

That said, I would like tagging to not ALWAYS work on a per conversation basis. I don't mind if that is the defaults but I'd like to be able to make other choices when it makes sense. I agree there are times when it's not the most appropriate basis for sorting mail and I would like to be able to choose.

Re:

[physman_wiu (933339)]

Go to this page and suggest turning off conversations as a new feature. A lot of people have been saying the same thing. Right now there is no way to disable it, but if enough people suggest that they add the option to disable it, it might make it in the next upgrade. https://services.google.com/inquiry/gmail_suggest/ [google.com]

Re:

[Archimonde (668883)]

Maybe I'm mistaken, but you can create a filter to automatically delete every mail you get (or still have) by its subject.

As you get spam by the same subject that should be no problem at all.

Re:

[Phroggy (441)]

You misunderstood - the messages are not spam, they're legitimate messages from an automated system. GMail groups them together because they have identical subject lines; the user wants to manage them individually.

How about fixing whats broken ??

[phoxix (161744)]

Like here [slashdot.org] ...

IMAP import

[Rui Lopes (599077)]

What I want is the support for external IMAP-based accounts. Currently one can only do that for POP-based. Only then I'll be able to ditch completely desktop mail apps (which suck a lot, btw).

Geeks using browsers for email?

[clang_jangle (975789)]

Am I the only one surprised at how many /.ers are using the web interface for email? After all, that's what MUAs and IMAP are for! I wouldn't dream of using my browser for that beyond the initial setup. I've put a lot of people on Gmail IMAP with mutt, TBird, Evolution, and Kmail. Aside from the winCE victims, why wouldn't everyone do it like this? Thumb drives are cheaper than ever, why risk your email account like that? Laziness?

Upload progress bar

[EnsilZah (575600)]

How about a friggin' upload progress bar?
I've seen it done on other sites so I know it shouldn't be too hard for them to implement.
Why can't Google have upload progress bars on it sites, Gmail and Googlepages especially?

Addressing Multiple Contacts

[altek (119814)]

I still can't believe their contacts list doesn't let you choose multiple contacts and compose an email to that list. I'm also shocked that you still can't go to Compose Email and then bring up your contact list from the To: field and start selecting contacts.

If anyone knows this is possible and I'm just totally missing the boat here, please clue me in!

Re:

[SpcCowboy (1303133)]

It is in plain English in the full article. Its the old school snake game.

Re:

[FurtiveGlancer (1274746)]

So now you expect /.ers to RTFA? When did this start? Next, you'll want us to spell out our acronyms FTW.

I, for one, do not welcome our new mandatory "RTFA before posting" overlords. :b

Re:

[jdunn14 (455930)]

How about an option to just turn the damn spam filter off? I have some business emails routed through gmail for reasons that aren't worth going into, and I'd much rather my POP3 client download and then filter ALL messages than have to go through the web interface once in a while to find the misclassified ones. And when I say "Not Spam" about a logwatch email from a server, how about you remember that and not classify the daily logwatch emails FROM THE SAME ADDRESS as spam in the future?

Re:Useless stuff...

[Andy_R (114137)]

Yes, because as Google explain in their Labs Blog but the BBC failed to explain in the linked article, these labs features are not intended to be mainstream mail features, they are little tweaks written by Google staff in their '20% time', the time that Google gives their developers to work on pet projects.