Gmail Labs

On 6th June 2008 @ 11:30 pm by Arul N S

Google kept up its word about releasing new features for Gmail today. A few experimental features for the web interface have been introduced under the banner of Gmail Labs. According to the official Gmail Blog, some of these features might be incorporated permantely or retired based on their usage. For now there are 13 features which will be expanded slowly. You can activate these features from your Gmail settings Labs tab. In case of any problems you can revert back to the original Gmail interface via a URL. Presently these are available for US and UK editions and other local editions need to wait I guess.

Some of the features worth checking out are

Quick Links : A box in the side menu which can hold any Gmail URL. It can be useful for your constant searches or views. Something like “in:inbox is:unread” search would yield all unread messages in inbox. It can be done for all the labels and different search queries.
Random Signature : Can be used to load signatures randomly from an RSS feed.
Star Icons : For those who star their conversations a lot, this will be very handy. After enabling this feature remember to add the extra icons in the setting menu.
Mouse gestures : You can use your right mouse button and a upward mouse gesture to go to inbox and left to go previous conversation and right gesture to next conversation.
Snakes Game : For who love the classic snake game just press “&” to bring up the game.
Custom Key Shortcuts : You can map your own keyboard shortcuts which can replace the present forgettable default key shortcuts.

Gmail Labs Screenshot

There are also few other features which one can check out provided you have switched over to Gmail. If you enable these features and if something goes wrong, you can temporarily disable Gmail Labs and enter in safe mode by visiting http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0.

via : [Official Gmail Blog]

Update on 17th June 2008 : Acccording to the Official Gmail Blog today, there is a Labs discussion forum where one could discuss and give feedback about the labs feature in Gmail and even suggest new ones.