Official Gmail Blog
News, tips and tricks from Google's Gmail team and friends.
Turn off Gmail’s conversation view
September 29, 2010
Posted by Wiltse Carpenter, Technical Lead
The way Gmail organizes mail into
conversations
is like cilantro. You either love it -- and, like me, enjoy the nice citrusy, herbal finish it gives to everything from salsa to curry -- or you hate it. And those of you who hate it hate it enough to launch sites like
nocilantro.com
and
ihatecilantro.com
(“an anti cilantro community”), where you can hate it together.
But my fondness for cilantro pales in comparison to my love for Gmail’s conversation view, or message threading. I haven’t had to wade through multiple messages to follow a conversation in years. A
centithread
hasn’t filled up the entire first page of my inbox in almost as long as I can remember. Having all the replies to an email (and replies to those replies) grouped with the original message simply makes communicating so much easier.
It turns out not everyone feels the same way. And just as an outspoken minority has banded together in unison to declare their distaste of one of nature’s most delicious herbs, some of you have been
very
vocal
about your dislike of conversation threading. So just like you can order your baja fish tacos without cilantro, you can now get Gmail served up sans conversation view. Go to the main
Settings page
, look for the “Conversation View” section, select the option to turn it off, and save changes. If you change your mind, you can always go back.
This feature will be rolling out over the next few days so if you don’t see it immediately, check back in a bit. And once you try it out,
let us know
what you think.
Updated Gmail app in Android Market
September 21, 2010
Posted by Simon Arscott and Paul Westbrook, Gmail for Android team
(Cross-posted from the
Mobile Blog
)
We just released a new version of the Gmail app in Android Market, so Gmail updates aren’t tied to Android version releases anymore. Now you can get new Gmail stuff faster without having to wait for system updates. To start you off, we’ve improved message replies, access to quoted text, and more.
As you scroll through a conversation, your most important message actions will now stick to the top of the screen, one click away, no matter how long the email is.
Don't remember what prompted the most recent email in a thread? Now you can view previous message content more easily, just like in the desktop version of Gmail. Tap “Show quoted text” to reveal the previous message.
Finally, this updated version of the Gmail app has limited support for
Priority Inbox
. If you’ve enabled Priority Inbox via the desktop version of Gmail, you’ll see an “Important” label that shows all messages flagged as important. You can even add a shortcut to “Important” to your home screen.
The Gmail update requires Froyo (Android version 2.2), so it’s available if you have a Nexus One, HTC EVO, Motorola Droid 2 or Motorola Droid. (Not sure if your device is running Android version 2.2?
Check here
.)
Get the update from Android Market (just scan the QR code below, or
Klicken Sie hier
if you're on a phone) and check out the new Gmail. We’d love to hear what you think at android-apps-support@google.com.
Update 9/21/10 12:26pm PDT: There is a known issue where the headers don't stick properly on some HTC phones like the EVO 4G and Droid Incredible. We are working to address this.
New in Labs: Video chat enhancements
September 16, 2010
Posted by Serge Lachapelle, Product Manager
If you use video chat in Gmail, you might be interested in a new Labs feature we just rolled out that allows you to preview new video chat features before they're turned on for everyone. Visit the
Gmail Labs tab under Settings
, turn on "Video chat enhancements," and right away, you'll see higher resolution video and a bigger video chat window.
The higher resolution video uses a new playback mechanism which enables widescreen VGA and frees up valuable resources on your computer. For it to work, both you and the person you're chatting with will need to have the lab turned on. Remember that you can always revert to standard video chat by disabling the lab.
We plan to add more video chat enhancements to this lab in the future, so if you have it on you'll automatically get those too. Feel free to post your comments or report any issues you encounter in the
video chat forum
(we also follow #googlevideochat on Twitter).
5 tips for using Priority Inbox
September 9, 2010
Posted by Kristen Lemons, Gmail Support Team
It’s been a week since we
launched Priority Inbox
, and now that you've hopefully had a chance to try it out, we wanted to share some tips to help you manage your email more efficiently. Here are five ways you can make Priority Inbox work even better for you:
1. Customize your sections
By default, Priority Inbox has three sections: "Important and Unread," "Starred" and "Everything Else.” But that doesn't mean you have to leave them that way. You can make a section show messages from a particular label (like your “Action” or “To-do” label), add a fourth section, or change the maximum size of any section. Visit the
Priority Inbox tab under Settings
to customize your sections, or do it right from the inline menus.
2. Train the system
If Gmail makes a mistake, you can help it learn to better categorize your messages. Select the misclassified message, then use the importance buttons at the top of your inbox to correctly mark it as important or not important.
For those of you who can't live without
keyboard shortcuts
, don’t worry, you can use the "+" and "-" keys to adjust importance as well.
3. See the best of your filtered messages
You can set up Priority Inbox to show you not just the best of your inbox, but also the best of messages you filter out of your inbox and might otherwise miss. Just change your Priority Inbox settings to “Override filters” and Gmail will surface any important messages that would otherwise skip your inbox.
With this option turned on, you can use filters to archive more aggressively and worry less about missing an important message.
4. Use filters to guarantee certain messages get marked important (or not)
If you read and reply to a lot of messages from your mom, Gmail should automatically put incoming messages from her in the “Important and unread” section. But if you want to be 100% sure that all messages from your mom (or your boss, boyfriend, client, landlord, etc.) are marked important, you can
create a filter
for messages from that sender and select “Always mark as important.” Similarly, if you regularly read messages from your favorite magazine, they should automatically get marked as important. If you’d rather they end up in the “Everything else” section, you can create a filter to never mark them as important.
5. Archive unimportant messages quickly
One of the features that can help make you more efficient is the ability to archive all of the visible messages in the "Everything Else" section at once. Just click on the down arrow next to "Everything Else" and select the "Archive all visible items" option. If you want to be able to archive even more messages at once, you can increase the maximum number of messages that show in that section from the same drop-down.
Trimming our privacy policies
September 3, 2010
Posted by Mike Yang, Associate General Counsel
(Cross-posted from the
Google Blog
)
Long, complicated and lawyerly—that's what most people think about privacy policies, and for good reason. Even taking into account that they’re legal documents, most privacy policies are still too hard to understand.
So we’re simplifying and updating Google’s privacy policies. To be clear, we aren’t changing any of our privacy practices; we want to make our policies more transparent and understandable. As a first step, we’re making two types of improvements:
Most of our products and services are covered by our main
Google Privacy Policy
. Some, however, also have their own supplementary individual policies. Since there is a lot of repetition, we are deleting 12 of these product-specific policies. These changes are also in line with the way information is used between certain products—for example, since contacts are shared between services like Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Docs, it makes sense for those services to be governed by one privacy policy as well.
We’re also simplifying our main Google Privacy Policy to make it more user-friendly by cutting down the parts that are redundant and rewriting the more legalistic bits so people can understand them more easily. For example, we’re deleting a sentence that reads, “The affiliated sites through which our services are offered may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies,” since it seems obvious that sites not owned by Google might have their own privacy policies.
In addition, we’re adding:
More content to some of our product Help Centers so people will be able to find information about protecting their privacy more easily; and
A
new privacy tools page
to the
Google Privacy Center
. This will mean that our most popular privacy tools are now all in one place.
These privacy policy updates will take effect in a month, on October 3. You can see the
new main Google Privacy Policy here
, and if you have questions
this FAQ
should be helpful.
Our updated privacy policies still might not be your top choice for beach reading (I am, after all, still a lawyer), but hopefully you’ll find the improvements to be a step in the right direction.
Email overload? Try Priority Inbox
August 30, 2010
Posted by Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer
People tell us all the time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce
Priority Inbox
(in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.
Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn't outright junk but isn't very important—bologna, or “
bacn
.” So we've evolved Gmail's filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this "bologna" from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.
Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:
As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the
or
buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)
After lots of internal testing here at Google, as well as with Gmail and Google Apps users at home and at work, we’re ready for more people to try it out. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use
Google Apps
, over the next week or so. Once you see the "
New! Priority Inbox
" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look.
Easier event scheduling in Google Calendar
August 26, 2010
Posted by Nassar Stoertz, Software Engineer
In the next day or so, you'll start to see some changes to the event page in Google Calendar which should make scheduling events easier. We've made the style more consistent with other Google apps, put information that’s most commonly used at the top of the screen, simplified the layout, and added some functionality.
A new repeating event editor
The old interface for creating recurring events was clumsy and took up too much space on the screen. Now you'll see only a summary of your recurring event on the main event page; if you want to edit it, you can use a window that opens when you select the "Repeats" checkbox.
A new tool to help you
find a time
for your event
You'll notice a new tab on the event page that should make it easier to find a good time to schedule an event. When your friends or coworkers give you permission to see their calendars, you can click this tab to see a preview of their schedules and hover over their events to see what conflicts they might have. This should make scheduling a tad easier, especially for events with large numbers of guests. For Google Apps users, the new schedule preview can also show data from other calendar services using our
Google Calendar Connectors API
.
Changes under the hood
As browsers and other technologies both within and outside of Google have evolved, we've found it necessary to occasionally make structural code changes in order to keep up. These visible changes are only the surface; underneath we've added a new model for how we represent calendar events in the browser and a new mechanism for how we make sure those events get properly saved. We've paid special attention to performance, consistency, and extensibility. In the short term, you'll hopefully notice that the event page opens slightly faster than it did before.
Call phones from Gmail
August 25, 2010
Posted by Robin Schriebman, Software Engineer
Gmail voice and video chat
makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”
Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.
Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be
free
for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very
low rates
. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see
comparison table
) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.
Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone. Just click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list and dial a number or enter a contact’s name.
We’ve been testing this feature internally and have found it to be useful in a lot of situations, ranging from making a quick call to a restaurant to placing a call when you’re in an area with bad reception.
If you have a Google Voice phone number, calls made from Gmail will display this number as the outbound caller ID. And if you decide to, you can receive calls made to this number right inside Gmail (see
instructions
).
We’re rolling out this feature to U.S. based Gmail users over the next few days, so you’ll be ready to get started once “Call Phones” shows up in your chat list (you will need to install the
voice and video plug-in
if you haven’t already). If you’re using Google Apps for your school or business, then you won’t see it quite yet. We’re working on making this
available more broadly
- so stay tuned!
For more information, visit
gmail.com/call
.
Update (8/26)
: This has now been rolled out to everyone in the U.S. If you don't see the feature yet, try logging out of Gmail and signing back in.
Use Linux? Now you can video chat too
August 19, 2010
Posted by Tristan Schmelcher, Software Engineer
If you’ve been wanting to use
voice and video chat
on Linux (our top video chat request), then we have good news for you: it’s now available! Visit
gmail.com/videochat
to download the plugin and get started. Voice and video chat for Linux supports Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions, and RPM support will be coming soon.
New in Labs: Find docs and sites quickly with Apps Search
August 18, 2010
Posted by Bram Moolenaar, Software Engineer
Where is that presentation? Was it attached to an email? Or in Google Docs? If you’re not sure, you may end up searching several places with the same query in order to find it. With the new “Apps Search” lab, we just made that all a bit simpler.
Once you enable it from the
Gmail Labs tab under Settings
, the “Search Mail” button in Gmail will say “Search Mail and Docs” instead, and your search results will include matching documents and sites in addition to email messages.
We also added “Did you mean?” style suggestions, for those of us who make mistakes (who doesn’t?):
You may notice that mail results show up just as fast as before while non-mail results may take a tiny bit longer. That way, if you’re just looking for an email, having this lab enabled won’t slow you down.
The paint is still wet and we plan to make further improvements the coming months, so be sure to
let us know
if you have any feedback.
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