No New Mail? Try Google+

What's the message displayed by Gmail when there's no message in your inbox? If you answered "No new mail! Want to read updates from your favorite sites? Try Google Reader", you are right. It was Google's subtle way to promote Google Reader.


Before Google Reader was released, Gmail's "inbox zero" message used to be: "No new mail! There's always Google News if you're looking for something to read."

Now that Google focuses on developing Google+, a modern version of Google Reader, Gmail's new message is: "No new mail! See what people are talking about on Google+." The links sends Gmail users to the "what's hot" section of Google+ which "highlights selected content thought to be exemplary, interesting, and appropriate: showing you serendipitous and diverse information".


From Google News to Google Reader and now Google+, Gmail illustrates three different ways to read news. Google News ranks and clusters articles from the web, Google Reader allows you to read news from your favorite sites, while Google+ lets you read the articles shared by the people you follow. From news that are important to everyone to news that are important to the people you trust.

Gmail's Shortcut for Inserting Hyperlinks

Less than 2% of the Gmail users have enabled keyboard shortcuts and actually use them, but that doesn't mean Google shouldn't improve them. Many people complained that Gmail's rich text editor doesn't have a shortcut for inserting hyperlinks and now it's available: Ctrl+K (or Cmd-K if you use a Mac).


The same shortcut is also used in Outlook, Microsoft Word, Google Docs and other apps. "Just select any text, and then press the Ctrl and K keys at the same time. A dialogue box opens where you can type a link," informs the Microsoft Word blog.

I wonder why Google doesn't offer the option to use the top search result for the text you've selected or at least pick one of the top results from the "edit link" box.

{ Thanks, Cougar. }

The Story Behind Gmail's Logo

If you've ever wondered who designed Gmail's logo, Kevin Fox has the answer:

Dennis Hwang designed the Gmail logo. At the time, Dennis designed virtually all of the Google doodles and he did a lot of the new logo work as well.

The logo was designed literally the night before the product launched. We were up very late and Sergey and I went down to his cube to watch him make it.

The initial version used the same font as the Google logo (Catull), but Catull has a very awkward 'a', so Dennis decided to use Catull for the 'G' to tie the brand to Google, then cast the others in a cleaner sans-serif (Myriad Pro, if I recall correctly).

Another ex-Googler, Douglas Edwards, confirms the story in his book "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59":

Dennis Hwang spent the day before the launch coming up with ideas for a logo and trying to make it work in conjunction with the clown-colored Google brand. (...) Even after four years at Google, I found it astounding that one twenty-something guy was sitting alone at his desk, sipping tea and developing the main branding element for a product to be used by millions of people - the night before it was scheduled to launch.

New Google Accounts Require Gmail and Google+

If you try to create a Google account from Google's homepage, you'll notice that Google redesigned the page, but that's not all. You'll now have to create a Gmail account, a Google Profile and you'll automatically join Google+.

Until now, creating a Google account was quite simple. You could either use an existing email address or create a Gmail account. The redesigned form includes new fields: name, gender (required for Google+) and mobile phone number (not required).



"Your Google Account is more than just Search. Talk, chat, share, schedule, store, organize, collaborate, discover and create. Use Google products from Gmail to Google+ to YouTube, view your search history, all with one username and password, all backed up all the time and easy to find at (you guessed it) Google.com," informs the page.

You can still delete your Google profile, the Google+ content and also your Gmail account.

New users no longer have to manually create a profile and join Google+, while Google found another way to increase the number of Google+ users (currently at 90 million) and the number of Gmail users (currently at 350 million). I've always wondered why Google never offered the option to create a Gmail account when you sign up for a Google account and now that's the only way to create a Google account.

Update: You can still use the old form if you know the URL or if you click "Sign up for a new Google Account" in Google Calendar, Blogger and probably a few other Google products.



Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Groups use a different page that lets you sign up using a Gmail address or a different email account. Just click "use a different email" and you'll see the old form.


Update 2. A Google spokesperson sent the following statement: "We're working to develop a consistent sign-up flow across our different products as part of our efforts to create an intuitive, beautifully simple, Google-wide user experience. Making it quick and easy to create a Google Account and a Google profile enables new users to take advantage of everything Google can offer."

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Gmail Scribbles

Gmail's app for iOS and mobile Gmail added a cool feature that's not even available in the desktop interface: Gmail Scribbles. "You can now open up a canvas and scribble a message that will be attached to your email. It's perfect for sending a quick sketch that is hard to express in words or adding a fun graphic to make your email more personal. Scribbles support different colors, brush sizes, lines, erasers and spray paint." Maybe Scribbles is just a sneak peek at an upcoming mobile version of Google Drawings.

Gmail 1.1 for iOS also changed the notification sound, added better support for nested labels and Google+ Circles. The settings page that was available in the mobile web app, is now included in the iOS app, so you can add a custom signature and a vacation responder.

Gmail Integrates With Google+

It looks like not only Google Contacts integrates with Google+. Gmail also added many features that make it easier to share files in Google+, add new people to your circles and find messages from these circles.

A lot of people complained that you can't find the messages sent or received by the members of a group. This feature is still not available, but you can restrict the messages to a circle. Gmail now displays the list of circles below the labels and you can use it to find mail from your family, friends, colleagues etc. It's obvious that groups are now less important than circles, even though I don't think they'll disappear.

"If you've spent time building your Google+ circles, you can now quickly use them to filter your mail, saving yourself from having to sift through that pile of daily deal emails and newsletters. You can see messages from all of your circles at once or from each individual circle. And if you want, you can show circle names on emails in your inbox. Contacts can also be filtered by circles, making it easier to view your social connections."

You can now add someone to a circle from the widget displayed in the right sidebar. There's also an easy way to share pictures from an email to Google+: just click "share" next to the attachment.

{ Thanks, Petros and Joost. }

Google Contacts Integrates With Google+

Gmail's contact manger started to include information from Google Profiles. You can also find your Google+ circles in the sidebar, below the list of groups.

By default, the data obtained from Google Profiles is displayed below the information you've entered, but you can combine them: go to a contact page, click the "More" dropdown and select "[Show external data] inline".

It's interesting to notice that the Google Profiles data is automatically added when you enter an email address associated with a profile. To remove this information, just delete the corresponding email address.

The latest features are also available at google.com/contacts, which has recently switched to the new Google Contacts interface, but you can find them in the old Gmail interface, as well.

{ Thanks, Scott, Filipe, Venkat, Yavuz, Shimmy, Zachary and Matt. }

Gmail's Hybrid iOS App

Two weeks after the embarrassing launch, Gmail's app for iPhone and iPad is back in the App Store. Google fixed a bug that broke one of the main features: notifications and that's the reason why the app has been temporarily removed from the App Store.

Gmail's "native" app is actually a wrapper for a new version of the Gmail web app, enhanced with a few features that integrate it with the operating system: basic push notifications, image upload and a new navigation menu. It's interesting that the new interface of the mobile web app is only available if you use the "native" app.

I've always thought that Gmail's mobile web app is much better than the native Android app, so it's a pleasant surprise to see that Google didn't develop a completely new app for iOS. This way, you'll always get the latest features and you don't have to wait until Google releases a new version.

Regarding notifications, the app only supports badges and sound notifications, so you won't see the banner notifications introduced in iOS 5. Hopefully, Google will address this issue in a future update.

"To try out the Gmail app today, install it from App Store on any iOS 4+ device. Those who already have the Gmail app released Nov 2 must uninstall or log out of the old app prior to installing the new app," suggests Google.

Gmail's New Look, Now Available

After almost two weeks since the last post about the new Gmail interface, you can now try it. Open Gmail and you should see a message at the bottom of the page that invites you to "switch to the new look".

Gmail's new look is based on the "Preview" theme, but it's much more than a theme. There are a lot of changes: Contacts and Tasks are now included in a drop-down menu below the Gmail logo, buttons like Archive or Label are only displayed when you select at least one message, there's a new settings menu that lets you change the display density, gadgets and the chat box are now resizable, there's a new interface for conversations, advanced search options are now displayed when you click the arrow in the search box and you can try HD themes.

For now, you can switch to the old interface from the settings menu, but Google says that this option will be removed soon.

{ via Gmail's blog }

A New Look for Gmail

A video from Google's YouTube channel (update: the video is now private, but there's a mirror here) introduces a new Gmail interface. It's based on the Preview theme that's already available in Gmail, but there are many other changes: an action bar that uses icons instead of text labels, a completely new interface for conversations, profile pictures next to contacts, a flexible layout that adapts to any window size, display density options like in Google Docs, resizable chat/labels sections, new high-definition themes and an updated search box that includes advanced options.






I don't see the new interface yet, but it will probably be available soon. It's interesting that there's an arrow next to "Mail" and the links to Google Contacts and Google Tasks are missing. Maybe you'll be able to use the arrow to switch to other Google services.


{ Thanks, Carlos. }

Gmail Tests a Huge Image Ad

Who would have expected to see a giant image ad on Gmail's sign out page? For now, it's just an experiment and it's displayed when you log out from Gmail, but I bet that Gmail users won't be happy to see it when it will no longer be an experiment.

One of the great things about Gmail was that the ads were relevant and unobtrusive. The huge ad for Vistaprint is not relevant and it's really obtrusive. "With Gmail, you'll never see pop-ups or untargeted banner ads. Instead we display text ads and related links you might find useful and interesting." This was one of the top 10 reasons to try Gmail, but it was removed from this page.

A Gmail help page explains that "occasionally we may show a banner ad on the Gmail logout page. This ad is different from other ads in Gmail since it's not related to the content of your Gmail account. Instead, it's the same type of ad that appears on the YouTube homepage."

New York Times reported in May that "Gmail will begin allowing advertisers to use images. For example, an e-mailed offer for a ski package showing a skier on the slopes could be accompanied by an ad on the right side of the screen, showing a competing offer, replete with another skier coming down another slope. The image used in the ad would be static, not animated, and would be used only in cases where the e-mail message itself showed images."

{ Thanks, Gary. }

Offline Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs

As promised, Google brought back the offline mode for Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs. The updated apps use HTML5 features and no longer require the Gears plugin.



For Gmail, Google chose the easy way out and tweaked the tablet interface. You can only use it in Google Chrome after installing this app from the Chrome Web Store. The app lets you archive and label email, compose new messages and read the messages you've received, but it doesn't have all the features from the standard version. The interface is more suitable for tablets, so this is more like a temporary workaround instead of a definitive solution.







Offline Google Calendar and offline Google Docs aren't yet available to everyone and will be rolled out in the coming days. Google says that the offline mode is built into the apps, just like the Gears version. "Google Calendar and Google Docs let you seamlessly transition between on- and offline modes. When you're offline in Google Calendar, you can view events from your calendars and RSVP to appointments. With Google Docs you can view documents and spreadsheets when you don't have a connection. Offline editing isn't ready yet, but we know it's important to many of you, and we're working hard to make it a reality. To get started using Google Calendar or Google Docs offline, just click the gear icon at the top right corner of the web app and select the option for offline access," explains Google.



I don't see the offline settings for Google Calendar and Google Docs in my account, but offline Gmail is disappointing. It only works in Chrome, it has a different URL (https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/), the interface is optimized for iPad and Android tablets and it's very limited. Hopefully, Google will add support for offline access to the regular interface.

Gmail's Newest/Oldest Pagination Features

The latest Gmail design refresh replaced pagination links with arrow buttons. Even if it's not obvious, the navigation links that sent you to the newest/oldest messages are still available in the new interface. Just click the message similar to "11-20 of 3903" from the screenshot below and you'll see the two options that appeared to be missing.





This works for Gmail's search results and when you click one of the labels. For example, you can go to the "All Mail" system label, click the pagination message, select "Oldest" and find the first messages from your Gmail account.



For the search terms that return a lot of results, the only pagination feature that works is "newest" because Gmail shows vague estimations for the number of results like "1-20 of hundreds" or "1-20 of thousands" and it can't determine the last page of results.



{ Thanks, jpp. }

Show Fewer Gmail Conversations

If you've ever wanted to see less than 25 conversations on a page in Gmail, you'll be glad to know that it's now possible to do that. Just go to Gmail's settings page and select 10, 15 or 20 from the drop-down "Show [x] conversations per page". Until now, the only options were 25, 50 and 100.





The new options are useful if you don't receive too many messages or if you want to improve Gmail's performance. Gmail loads a lot faster if it only has to fetch 10 conversations instead of 25.





{ Thanks, Herin. }

Templates for Google Contacts

Gmail added a new feature that makes it easier to add a new contact: templates. If you click "More actions" when you create a contact or edit an existing one, you can select the business template to quickly add fields for the job title, company name, mobile phone and work phone.


The default template is more generic:


Google Contacts lets you add or delete fields, but you can't delete the fields from a template. Hopefully, Google will allow users to create custom templates and import some of the data from Google Profiles.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Microsoft's Gmail Man Ad

Mary-Jo Foley found a Microsoft ad that tries to convince businesses to choose Office 365 instead of Google Apps because Gmail shows targeted ads. Microsoft created a character called Gmail Man, a postman that doesn't care about people's privacy and reads their messages to find related ads.

The irony is that the paid version of Google Apps doesn't show ads, even though administrators can choose to enable them. I thought that the whole "Gmail reads my mail" myth was debunked back in 2004 and people realized that online email services already used algorithms to index messages and to find spam.

"It was a fascinating angle in 2005 while Gmail was still new and under all kinds of scrutiny, but today, who cares that your emails are automatically scanned, really? Even before Gmail, ISP's already had the ability to read all your emails, but it has never really stopped anyone from using the email service of their choice," thinks Cédric Beust, a former Googler.

{ via Daring Fireball }

Gmail's Auto-Forwarding Notice

Google decided to show a pink bar which informs Gmail users that their messages are automatically forwarded to another email address. The annoying "you are forwarding your email to ..." is displayed for about 3 minutes every time you open Gmail this week.


The explanation for this temporary annoyance is that some malicious software or other people who gain access to your account can setup auto-forwarding. "For about a week, this notice will appear for a few minutes each time you sign in to your account. Displaying the notification in this way helps ensure that you have a chance to see the notice, rather than someone who might try to gain unauthorized access to your account and use this setting improperly. The notice will disappear immediately if you choose to disable the forwarding setting, but that decision is up to you," mentions Google.

So that's the reason why there's no "dismiss" link and you're forced to see the pink bar again and again. Maybe it would be more useful to show this message for one week after auto-forwarding has been setup.

If you no longer want to see the message, temporarily disable auto-forwarding, switch to the simplified HTML interface or pin the Gmail tab if you use Chrome, Firefox or Opera. Another option is to add this filter in AdBlock Plus: mail.google.com##.fVKDI (the extension is available for Firefox and Chrome).

Gmail's Friend Suggest Algorithm

A recent Google paper [PDF] offers a lot of interesting information about an algorithm used by Gmail to suggest friends and to create contact groups.

Analyzing the outgoing and incoming messages, Gmail creates a social graph for each user. "We call the hypergraph composed of all of the edges leading into or out of a single user node that user's egocentric network. (...) Edges in the implicit social graph have both direction and weight. The direction of an edge is determined by whether it was formed by an outgoing email sent by the user, or an incoming email received by the user. There may be both outgoing and incoming edges joining a user and an implicit group, if the user has both sent and received email from the group. We consider a user to have received mail from a group by joining the sender of the mail and the other co-recipients into an implicit group. (...) The weight of an edge is determined by the recency and frequency of email interactions between the user and the group."

The social graph exists, even if it's not very obvious and not many Gmail features use it. The Friend Suggest algorithm uses the implicit groups to suggest contacts when you send a message to multiple recipients ("Don't forget Bob!") and to find contacts that are added by mistake to a list of recipients ("Got the wrong Bob?"). The two features have recently graduated from Gmail Labs.


"Our algorithm is inspired by the observation that, although users are reluctant to expend the eff ort to create explicit contact groups, they nonetheless implicitly cluster their contacts into groups via their interactions with them."

According to Google, more than 10% of the Gmail messages are sent to more than one recipient and more than 4% of the messages are sent to 5 or more recipients. All of these messages allow Google to automatically cluster contacts into groups that change dynamically.

Google says that Friend Suggest could have many other uses, "such as identifying trusted recommenders for online recommendation systems, or improving content sharing between users in various online contents."

{ via Greg Linden }

Preview Gmail's New Interface

Gmail found an interesting way to test the new Google+ interface: using themes. If you go to the Themes page and select "Preview" or "Preview (dense)", you'll be able to try the upcoming Gmail interface. "Why two themes? Our new interface will eventually expand dynamically to accommodate different screen sizes and user preferences, but until then you can pick the information density that you prefer," explains Google.


The new interface uses the same color scheme from Google Maps, Google Calendar and Google Search, the same gray header and blue search button. Since Gmail has two search buttons, Google had to use labels to distinguish between the button that lets you search your message and the Google Search button. The interface is cleaner, since it uses a lot of white space to separate the different sections.

Even if you don't enable the new themes, you'll still see some subtle design changes: many links are now buttons (navigation links, "Back to message list"), the "Refresh" button uses a familiar icon, the "More actions" button changed the label to "More" and Gmail's footer is much cleaner. These are just the first UI updates, so we'll see many other changes until "Preview" becomes the default theme.


Gmail is a complex application and it's difficult to simplify the interface and make it more consistent, especially when you consider the numerous Gmail Labs features and themes. "You can expect some updated themes that embody the same design principles but are better suited to working in a dark environment, use a different color palette, or include the illustrations that we know many of you love to see around your inbox," mentions Gmail's blog.

It should be obvious right now that Google+ is more than a social network or a social layer, it's a Google-wide initiative that affects both the form and the functionality of Google's applications. It's actually a new Google, a social Google that tries to offer cutting-edge apps and a cohesive experience.

{ Thanks, Maarten, James, Yasar, סמנה, Mushaf, Kai, Anthony, Jason, Kartik, David and Karol. }

People Widget and Other New Gmail Features

Gmail added a lot of new features lately. The People Widget, announced one month ago, should be available to everyone. The widget shows information about the people you're communicating with: profile photos, occupation, recent Buzz messages, recent email and documents shared with you, calendar availability and more.


If you already use Rapportive, you need to disable the extension to see the People Widget. You can also disable the People Widget from the settings page. Rapportive has more data sources than Gmail's widget: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Google Profiles, so you may find it more useful.

The action bar is displayed at the top of the page even when you scroll down, so you can quickly archive a conversation, label it or read the next conversation without scrolling to the bottom of the page or using keyboard shortcuts. A similar feature is available in Gmail's app for Android.


As you can see in the screenshot above, Gmail now shows additional information next to the sender's name to help you protect against email spoofing. When you receive a message from some who isn't in your address book, Gmail will show the email address next to the name. If a website sends an email on behalf of someone, Gmail adds "via domain.com" next to the email address so that you know that the message wasn't sent directly. Gmail uses email authentication to verify the source of the messages you receive, but this data was only used to detect spam and phishing. Now Gmail also shows a warning which informs you that "this message may not have sent" from the email address that appears in the "from" header.


Google Contacts learned a thing or two about structured addresses and it now allows users to separately list the street name, the city, state and postal code. Google tries to split the address automatically, but the results aren't great all the time. Just click "details" next to the address and a new pane lets you edit address fields:


{ Thanks, Steren, Bogdan, Sean, Alex, Vasu and Amit. }