Hello World ! Mail for you

Hi all,
We live in digital era, and computers have become integral part of our life, more like a basic necessity for us. Of all things, Internet has become the most sought by people and really a very good invention by mankind. E-Mails have become the mode of communication, nobody bothers to send inland letters or post cards now, its all either email or a phone call. Internet can give you that too, mails voice calls, video calls etc. Even this blogging is a by-product of Internet, facebook, google all are big because they rule the internet. Gmail has become one of the most commonly used mail service throughout the world, and I still wonder why did they make the mail service free, when they began it. There are many service providers who give mail facility, but Gmail stands out. I am a fan of Google just like anyone else, and by the way to make things clear I love Microsoft too, not that I am biased, but Google looks much cooler in terms of their services in this mail scenario.
Gmail is not just another mail service, which provides mail facility, it has its own chat facility, through which we can send SMS’es, make voice calls, video calls even free of cost. This post is for some cool things I like about Gmail and may be one or two might be new to you even. I am not a good person in stats, so I have no idea about number of Gmail users, nor its history, this post is only about the features in Gmail.
Subject Line
The important thing in mails is the subject line which many of us miss while sending mails, Google pops up with a dialog box to tell you that you have the subject line empty, this may irritate you, but for people who use outlook for official purposes, know the importance of subject lines, and Outlook doesn’t pop you with that dialog box.

Attachments

The most common thing in mails is attachments, which everybody is aware of. But the interesting part is that Google offers us a better solution for it than just plain attachment service. Google not only checks on the subject line, but checks on the attachment part too, if we have text like ‘ find the attachment’ or ‘I have attached’ or some more similar text patterns it pops you up with a dialog box, if u had not attached anything in the mail. That’s really a cool thing to do, to serve its customer better. Also to be mentioned that not all patterns are matched but at least some are. ( Yahoo, another popular mail service doesn’t give you this.)

Most of us would click on the ‘Attach a file’ to attach files, but that’s not at all required, all we need is a drag and drop that will do it !! Probably, this came after Google wave came I suppose.




Recipients

Another important thing which I noticed recently is the auto suggest option coming up while composing mails, if we don’t use a distribution list or contact group, we add the recipient mail ID’s manually, and most of the times its sent to more than one, and we end up missing some or other. So now if you want to send mail to that set of people, whom you haven grouped in a list or group, if we just enter one mail id, automatically Google suggests you with other names, which you can just click to add. Cool isn’t it ? Google autosuggest is not just for searches, its used in Gmails even !!

Dots in mail id’s
Aye! This is the most common misconception, we think that having dots in our email IDs will help us to find a unused ID soon, and this is not true !! Even i thought the same, and I have a '.' in my mail id, send a mail to ur id without dot '.' in it, or even with any dots in ur id, for example mine is abc.def@gmail.com, u can send a mail to abcdef@gmail.com or a.b.c.def@gmail.com or any such pattern , it will always be delivered.. This feature is not in Yahoo.

Title bar change..

This is another interesting feature I came up on, most of the times we will have more tabs in our browser, and it has its width reduced to it. And standard Gmail inbox will have the title has Gmail - Priority Inbox (n)- abc@gmail.com or Gmail - Inbox (n) - abc@gmail.com ,the former being the case of Priority Inbox, the later the usual inbox. So if at all we get new mails , wont it be nice if we have it in the title bar itself, we need not go to the page to check whether mail has come. That feature is also there, display like Priority Inbox (n) -abc@gmail.com or Inbox(n) - abc@gmail.com , is possible through another labs feature in Gmail called, Title Tweaks.

Mouse Gestures

Most often we get mails which are more than one screen long, and most likely we have to scroll either up or down to find the next/previous button, in that case, wont it be good if we have an option in mouse to move back or front, Gmail gives us that. All we have to do is press the right button in the mouse, and move either left or right to move to the previous or next message. This feature is enabled through another labs setting, Mouse Gesture.

Undo a message sent

This is another important feature, which GMail has given us, if we didnt finish the mail properly, or forgot to put something, if we can decide that within seconds of pressing send , we can cancel it. Either we can stop sending, thats a standard feature, if the mail is being sent. If the mail is sent, and we want to revoke it, we can do it, now within 30 seconds, the reciever will never get the mail nor the notification that this mail has been revoked or something like that. But as of now the time frame is only 30 seconds. This feature can be invoked by a labs feature called Undo Send.

Google Map for address

Most of the times we have to send address to our friends to meet them, if we want to give them directions , we give them the directions through google maps link. But again the reciever has to open the link to check, and most of the cases in Google maps, we dont search with door numbers etc. But in mails, we send the address with door nos etc. So Gmail allows you to enable maps for the address you have mentioned in the mail, through another lab setting called Enabled Maps. As of now this feature is available only to address in US, and not in India.





SHVA

   Ever wondered what does SHVA mean ? Its not a typo of some other word (or my name:D). Have you ever noticed it while seeing your inbox ??? Hmmm, ok enough of making your grey cells thinking, it will be there in the address bar, as soon as we login , it will remain the same always, its definitely not the session parameter,which will change everytime we login. So wat does it mean ??? There is no official word on it, but as far i google'ed it means, Should Have Valid Authentication.

May be there are more features in Gmail, but these I felt are very nice and much cooler than the normal inbox. So if you want to understand what all Labs is about, Google Labs is the first place to be in.

Bye till nex,

P.S: This post is dedicated to all the people in Google, for their work to make this world cooler, and helping me to blog :)