And now the reverse is true. The reverse of dragging a file to attach to a Gmail message is… dragging an attachment out of a Gmail email to save to your desktop.
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Gmail now lets you drag attachments out of e-mailsRead More »
As much as mankind’s (now) convoluted legal system keeps our complicated world (mostly) in check, sometimes it can just run amuck, particularly in the field of patent law.
Take the case of NTP, which claims to have a patent on “wireless e-mail”. They have already extracted a sizable chunk of licensing monies (~$600M) out of R.I.M, maker of Blackberry smartphones. NTP is now going after the other big names in the smartphone business: Apple, Google, Microsoft, HTC, LG, and Motorola.
With any luck, these companies have altered their technology enough to avoid losing to NTP, because a win for them puts them in position to continue terrorizing the industry with lawsuits.
Gmail has long had an automatic link to a map to the right of the e-mail if it detected an address in the body. But now, there’s a new Gmail Lab called “Google Maps previews in mail” that will let you preview the map right in the body of the e-mail.
It takes a few seconds to load, but it seems quicker than either clicking that automatic link or copying & pasting the address into a separate Google Maps window.
More Gmail Labs goodies. First up is the Message Sneak Peek which when enabled, lets you preview a message without having to open them first. There is either a keyboard shortcut (‘h’) or you can right-click. Strangely enough, this only worked in Firefox for me and not Chrome.
Next is the much desired and anticipated Nested Labels which mimics hierarchical folders in traditional e-mail and file systems. Although already offered in extensions like Better Gmail, many folks wanted it built-in and/or offered directly by Google, as the extensions tended to break from time to time when Gmail was updated.
Gmail takes on a new dual-pane look for the iPad with a list of messages on the left and the conversation thread appearing to the right. Gmail for iPad still has features such as offline access and caching for faster response.
Google rolled out its latest product, called Google Buzz [announcement], this time in the social networking arena. Buzz is built into Gmail and has tight integration with your e-mail inbox.
You can share links, photos and videos directly from within Gmail and it uses your existing set of Gmail contacts. You can see what your friends are sharing and Buzz also recommends items based on your activity.
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Google jumps into the social web with Buzz; goes up against Facebook, Twitter, et al.Read More »
I much prefer to receive e-mail than snail mail (unless they’re checks!) and so I’m really like the idea of this new service called Zumbox. It’s a paperless mail/postal system. Zumbox has created a virtual mailbox for each street address in the US and anyone can send virtual mail to your Zumbox mailbox.
Now, this is not the same as your e-mail address, but something you need to sign into which works well because you don’t necessarily need to check your snail mail every single day, nor would I want all that advertising coming straight to my e-mail inbox.
The best part is that it’s free. In case you’re wondering what the catch is, they probably are able to resell their service to marketers and advertisers, so yeah, your virtual mailbox may end up being clogged with virtual spam, but hey, better than my actual mailbox.
Hit Zumbox.com to sign up and claim your mailing address.
Offline Gmail has been a Gmail Lab for quite some time now, and is now being sanctioned by the Gmail team as ready for general consumption and will become a regular feature of Gmail.
There will now be an Offline tab when you visit your Gmail Settings. From there, you can initiate and control how a copy of your Gmail account will be downloaded and synchronized to your computer.
If you’re an e-mail client user, then you should consider Mozilla’s latest version of Thunderbird (version 3) released this week. New features include tabs a la Firefox (and other web browsers), better integration with Gmail, a new archiving feature, and more.
Open-source Thunderbird 3 is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Do you get too much e-mail, whose volume has grown significantly in recent times due to social networking notifications from the likes of Facebook & Twitter?
How do you sort it out and quickly? Filters? Folders? Those methods may be doing the trick right now, but Mozilla Labs is working on a different approach – creating views of your messages (not necessarily e-mail only) and letting you interact with those conversations without having to switch applications.
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Mozilla Labs’ Raindrop project aims to cut through e-mail clutterRead More »
