Gmail Labs: An innovation from google labs

If you are a Gmail user, soon you will find a tab on your gmail page to access a new part of the service called “Gmail Labs”.

Gmail Labs, a product from Google Labs, will initially provide 13 features to the Gmail users to add to their service. It is a part of the nifty development model followed by google. Any engineer having a new idea for a Gmail feature can publish it on the Gmail Labs site, and users can test it out and provide feedback directly to the engineer who wrote it.

Let's take a tour to the new features of Gmail Labs.

Here are the features that looks most beneficial to me:

• Superstars: It provides additional star icons as in standard Gmail. You will be able to mark your messages with different colored stars and other icons like a check mark or exclamation point.

• Quick Links: It is a way of bookmarking any page within Gmail. You can do a search and bookmark that search. Go back to it again and the link will display any new messages that fit the search criteria.

• Signature Tweaks: This feature enables you to put your automated signature above the quoted text while responding to a message, inspite of displaying at the bottom of what somebody else wrote.

• Email Addict: It is like a break time that will lock you out of gmail for 15 minutes. You can get back in to your account anytime you want, just by clicking a button.

• Random Signature: It will append a random famous quote to the end of your email.

• Mouse Gestures: You can navigate your mouse with gestures. Hold right click and move the mouse left to go to a previous conversation, move right to go to the next conversation, and move up to go back to the inbox view.

Other features in gmail labs:

• Pictures in Gmail chat

• Custom keyboard shortcuts

• Hide unread count

• Fixed width font

• Custom date format

• Muzzle (hide the status of your contacts in Gmail chat)

• Play Snake inside Gmail

What if you face probs ?

All the gmail users would have to just click on a button to enable these features. In case if any user don’t like them or they don’t work well, another button is provided to disable them. They’ll be available through the settings tab at the top of the page. While using the new features, if one of the labs feature breaks and you are facing trouble getting into your account, then there’s an escape hatch. Simply go to http://www.mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0 and Labs with be temporarily disabled.