Gmail Labs Lets Users Experiment With 13 New Features 142
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:HTML signatures (Score:5, Insightful)
>images) in my gmail signature...
Fine, as long as they also enable me to filter out images and "rich" formatting.
Re:HTML signatures (Score:5, Interesting)
So who know, if you ask for it you might just get it.
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It's good that other people have it now as it is a really useful feature and once it is standard gtalk will be a lot more useful for people in an office environment.
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Because IMHO it would be really great to see video support in Google Talk (yes, standalone one), though you might like more if it would implement groupchat, I guess
It would become perfect IM app...no nonsense, best in VoIP quality (very noticeable on poor connections) and I have hope that Google would implement video properly, with high fps and good synchronisation taking priority over high resolution or even colours. And all
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You have not because you ask not.
I find this is true with many developers. There's few things better in the world than responsive developers, open source or otherwise.
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Re:HTML signatures (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:HTML signatures (Score:5, Informative)
In summary, KNOCK IT OFF - no one likes those dumbass signatures; your regular correspondents are simply to polite to tell you.
Re:HTML signatures (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oh, BBC, you make it so easy. (Score:5, Funny)
Whats wrong with Old Snakey? (Score:2, Insightful)
old snakey (Score:1)
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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.Non-English? (Score:4, Informative)
2) Doesn't work unless you use Firefox 2 or IE 7.
Sorry, folks... work on it a bit more!
Re:Non-English? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Non-English? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Non-English? (Score:4, Informative)
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Google Apps likes shiney new things too! (Score:5, Interesting)
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! (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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.
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I imagine the outcry from regular Gmail users would be on par.
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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.
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(The exceptions have been problems setting up Postini and trouble with the Calendar losing whole calendars)
Re:Google Apps likes shiney new things too! (Score:5, Informative)
(obDisclosure: I'm a Google employee, but not in the gmail department)
Re:Google Apps likes shiney new things too! (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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This allows you to have your special account/address, and be able to test the new features.
YMMV, just my $0.02, etc...
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What the hell? That's my domain! How did you get access to my domain through Google Apps?
But you're getting what you paid for (Score:2)
But aren't you getting exactly what you paid for?
If I was running a business that was based on Google Apps, I'd want them to stay as stable and predictible as possible. If things started breaking or becoming less efficient than I'd planned on because Google decided to throw a random test feature into the code base every 3 or 4 weeks, I'd get
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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. (Score:4, Interesting)
*)
http://weblog.timaltman.com/archive/2008/02/24/gmails-buggy-imap-implementation
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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?
Why the vote? (Score:1, Interesting)
Offtopic:
The same applies to social networking sites, where the frontpages seems to be always based only on votes, while I think it should be based on votes, clicktrough-rate and number of comments; i.e. there are some great frontpage-worthy articles on reddit's controversial-tab with 0 points (500 upvotes, 500 downvotes) and 200+ comments.
One feature I really miss... (Score:4, Interesting)
Signature tweaks! (Score:2)
Re:Signature tweaks! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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I hate having to scroll down through old text to find the latest bit. I always top-post in my email, unless I'm replying to a complicated message, where it might make more sense to intersperse bits of my reply in with the message I'm replying to.
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My #1 feature (Score:2)
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I used Apple Mail but I'm sure Thunderbird would work just as well.
But not conversation disabling... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I would like tagging to not ALWAYS work on a per conversation basis.
Well, Gmail has a "per message" tag built in that looks like an image of a star. I highly doubt that the star-icon would help you much, since you seem to want to apply different tags to specific messages in the same conversation. However, it highlights the fact that "per message" functionality is already currently available and a well-worded e-mail to Gmail Customer Service might trigger them to add a requirement that blurs the line between stars and tags.
In fact, I think it would be cool if I could "
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In fact, I think it would be cool if I could "tag" with icons. [...] Adding little "icons" would (I think) greatly increase my ability to visually parse a page of many different types of tagged messages.
This is one of the new GMail Labs features you can enable.
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As you get spam by the same subject that should be no problem at all.
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Urgent things get dealt with right away, so they don't wind up bunching up in a conversation (I delete them rather than archiving them).
obDisclosure: I'm a Google employee, but not in the gmail group.
I doubt Google is just doing what it wants (Score:2, Informative)
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Why don't you set up a filter? You could give them a label, mark as read, and archive them. You would no longer see the emails, but be able to find them easily should you need to.
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What's particularly interesting (and infuriating) about this behavior is that RFC 822 proscribes specific headers that indicate that an Internet email message is related to another email message, yet Gmail ignores these and gloms conversa
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How about fixing whats broken ?? (Score:2)
IMAP import (Score:4, Interesting)
Geeks using browsers for email? (Score:3)
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In any given day I probably touch about 5-10 different PCs that I end up checking my email at (and multiple email addresses at that). I suspect that my scenario is very common among slashdotters. It is not even close to realistic to use a thick client. And don't bring up the "app on a thumb drive" because that's a whole other layer of maintenance and complexity that I don't have time for.
Most web mail products have become very "thin client" nowadays and work qu
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Right, so add multiple servers and it's just like me. Multiple boxen, multiple accounts, multiple IMAPs.
I already did bring that up. I guess maybe we have different th
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Well, for one thing, for those of us who do the bulk of our banking and shopping online (a great timesaver for which I am truly grateful) most receipts, invoices, alerts, etc come via email. I sure as hell wouldn't want them coming IM.
While I see IM
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I prefer to write, and read, long well thought out messages. Most of the messages I send are at least a page long, and most of the ones I receive are long too. Not long ago I was working on a book with someone, and often the messages were around 5 pages
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Why risk our email accounts like what?
You mean having google administer them? It's a risk I'm prepared to take for the convenience of not having to administer my own server.
I guess you could call it laziness but I prefer to call it 'making better use of my time'.
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It is trivial for a third party to see your password when you login from your browser, more so if you're a dunce who stores them in the browser.
Please turn in your geek card on your way out.
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Er... gmail logins are always done via SSL. You can't just sniff the login.
Please turn in your geek card on your way out.
After you.
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Passwords stored in the browser do not require an attacker to break SSL, and SSL can certainly be broken, especially if you're on wifi.
Nope, not this time.
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You face exactly the same problem if you store your password in a standalone email client. It's not something specific to webmail. I don't store my password in either my browser or mail client.
and SSL can certainly be broken, especially if you're on wifi.
In which case how are you safer with a standalone email client?
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It is trivial for a third party to see your password when you login from your browser, more so if you're a dunce who stores them in the browser.
So what? The risk of having a password hacked (by looking over the shoulder or by hacked browsers) is a relatively small additional risk to the risks already present in email. Nearly every piece of email I have, sent or received, and perhaps yours as well, has traversed systems I don't control sans encryption. There's nothing in my email that isn't something I'm aware of the possible publicness of.
You don't need my email account password to spoof email from me pretty well, either, this happens to me al
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I don't think so. But then the way I work requires me to have reliable accounts that don't get pwned. It's a simple matter of consistency == trust. I guess not everyone feels that way. But I'll bet you will, when the day comes that you're negotiating something important and you get locked out of your own account. Also, when you answer valid security concerns with "so what?", it certainly triggers a red flag for me. I sure wo
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But, I am curious
If you're saying, and perhaps you are, that you never access your mail from a machine you don't control, then perhaps I can see your point. But I don't see that grabbing a password (presuming one has a little cautio
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Heh, I wish. But now you're talking about privacy, which is a bit different from security. I don't really believe that we have privacy here in the states -- maybe with PGP, but good luck getting most of your clients to use it. :) My concern is accounts being com
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I have yet to find a thick e-mail client that works as well and as cleanly as Gmail's interface.
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Well, as I have actually seen my gmail accounts' web interface maybe twice each in the two years I've used them (just to administer settings), I'm not certain about exactly what you mean. All MUAs with which I am familiar will let you oragnize emails very easily in at least two ways (labels and folders), and they all thread by subject easily enough as well. Email search is present and works perfectly in TBird and Ev
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Back it up via IMAP/POP3. I have Thunderbird on my box only to do monthy Gmail backups. It will remember when you last downloaded you archive, and sync from that point froward whenever you connect. Granted the first time you do this, it might be a pain, depending on how large your archive already is.
Upload progress bar (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
If anyone knows this is possible and I'm just totally missing the boat here, please clue me in!
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As for the groups, I do use groups to some extent, but there's a lot of times I send an email to a lot of people but it's a very specific group
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How about supporting standards? (Score:2)
damn antivirus (Score:2)
All I really wanted was to be able to disable that f**king antivirus of theirs. I receive lots of mails with lots of por^H^H^Himages, and waiting for the antivirus to finish its work before being able to click "view all images" is a PITA.
They could at least allow administrators (gmail for your domain) to turn it off.
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Messages from (with RDNS checks) people in your contacts are never placed in the spambox. Spam/Not Spam classifications are content-learning mechanisms and are applied after white- and black-lists.
Re:Useless stuff... (Score:4, Informative)
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