Gmail: Google Enables SMS Text Messaging in Chat

Google first launched this feature in October, but was quickly removed due to bugs. Now you can use this feature in your Gmail Chat. You can send SMS Messages to anyone right from the chat window. Just enter the phone number to which you want to send SMS Message, then the recipient can reply you by simply selecting reply option from his phone.

According to the Gmail Blog, the service is currently applied for the US numbers only, you can send SMS Messages from anywhere in the world to the US numbers only.

what Google says about this feature..

Text Messaging in Chat
Send SMS text messages right from Gmail. You chat from your comfy computer and reach your friends on the go; they get your messages as texts and can peck out replies on their little keyboards.

To activate this feature in your Gmail account, simply click on Settings, and then click on Labs tab. Here, scroll through the list and find the option "Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat" and select Enable and Save Changes.

E-mail Encryption using Gmail, Firefox and Windows

Giving security to your e-mails is one of the most important thing over the Internet. There are many hackers, crackers and even your friends who want to know what is in your e-mail. Sending personal or confidential information through the e-mail is very risky. But don't worry here is the solution for it, following is the video tutorial from instructable which teaches you how to install GPG4win and FireGPG on your PC to send and receive encrypted e-mails through Gmail. [instructable]

Send and Receive Encrypted E-mail in Gmail - video powered by Metacafe

Gmail is now even more Faster.

Great performance has always been attraction of the Gmail and the Gmail team is working everyday to make it faster. Recently the Gmail team decided to take a closer look at some other key parts of Gmail to see if they could speed things up, so you could get even better experience.

The team found that the initial loading sequence of Gmail can be improved. The loading sequence is everything that happens behind the scenes between the time you press the "Sign In" button on the login page and the moment you land in your inbox. They made some improvements to this area by reducing the HTTP request required to load an inbox and display it.

The team claims that they have reduced the overall load time up to 20%. Here's what they say about improvements.

We spent hours poring over these traces to see exactly what was happening between the browser and Gmail during the sign-in sequence, and we found that there were between fourteen and twenty-four HTTP requests required to load an inbox and display it. To put these numbers in perspective, a popular network news site's home page required about a 180 requests to fully load when I checked it yesterday. But when we examined our requests, we realized that we could do better. We decided to attack the problem from several directions at once: reduce the number of overall requests, make more of the requests cacheable by the browser, and reduce the overhead of each request.

I found little improvements loading the Gmail page. Have you felt some changes or improvements?

Edit your Gmail contacts directly from your Chat List

It happens sometimes that when you add a new friend to the Gmail chat, email address is added as their contact name, such as hikingfan@gmail.com. Everyone wants to display names of their friends in the chat list so you will never be confused as to who's who. The only way to change this, people used to go to contacts, select contact profile, add the name of the friend, and then save it.

Now with the new version of Gmail (launched for Firefox 2 and IE7) you can correct the above problem by editing your Gmail contacts directly from the chat list. You just need to hover your mouse pointer over one of the contact, you will get a pop-up with the contacts details. If you click on the contact name, it will automatically become an editable field. Now simply type the desired name and hit "enter". Your changes will save the name in your chat list as well as in your contacts.

[Gmail Blog]

9 Reasons to Archive your Gmail

Google has a Report which says that many Gmail users don't archive their email. I think many Gmail users don't know What is the use of Archive button in Gmail. Here is a short description of Archive in Gmail.

Archiving moves messages out of your inbox and into All Mail, letting you tidy up your inbox without deleting anything. Messages you archive can be found in All Mail, in any labels you've applied, and by searching Gmail. When someone responds to a message you've archived, the conversation containing that message will reappear in your inbox.

Here are 9 Reasons you should use Archive in Gmail.

9. Phone numbers and addresses
You never know when you'll need a phone number someone emailed you or an address that was in a signature.

8. Procrastination
Sometimes you want to get a message out of your inbox, but you don't want to deal with organization, and you don't want to trash it.

7. Posterity
Just because you’re not famous now doesn’t mean that in forty years (or fifteen minutes) you won’t want to write your memoir.

6. Winning arguments
“But on May 5, 2005 at 8:43pm EDT you said….”

5. Mailing lists
Do you really need to know what Clintobamccain is doing every day? Auto-archive* their messages until you want to donate again.

4. Birthdays
Search for “grandma birthday” and voila, find the message you sent her last April. Aren't you glad you archived instead of deleted?

3. That guy
Remember that guy you thought you’d never need to get in touch with ever again?

2. Because you can
May as well use the free storage space. Plus, clean inbox = clean mind.

1. Fate-tempting is bad. You just never know
Thirty-one days after you send that message to the Trash and it gets permanently deleted, you're going to need it. Don't tempt the fates.

Impressed? Want to start using Archive feature.

To Archive your email select the email and click on Archive button.

To move your email back from Archive click and go to All Mail, select the email and click Move to Inbox.

All reasons are provided by Official Gmail Blog.

Also Read: 9 reasons not to archive messages

Newest Gmail features for Google Apps users

Google announced one new update which is now rolling out to Google Apps users who haven't already opted in to get the latest improvements. Employees, students and other Google Apps users will soon start seeing useful features like -

• even faster interface
• group chat from the browser
• streamlined contact manager
• colored message labels
• improved keyboard shortcuts
• bookmarkable messages and searches

Google's new RSS feed will help users to stay up-to-date to latest Google Apps Improvements, so you can learn about changes to Google Apps as they happen.

"If you're a Google Apps administrator and you'd rather start getting new features right away instead of waiting, you can change a setting in the control panel to automatically get future features as they're released."

The Gmail Soap

Its quite funny!

2 Secret ways to get more from your Gmail Address

After revealing the use and benefits of Personal Level Indicators in Gmail nearly two days ago. Robby Stein, Associate Product Marketing Manager of Gmail recently discovered some little-known ways to use your Gmail address that can give you greater control over your inbox and save you some time and headache.

Below tips will teach you how to make use of your gmail address beyond you@gmail.com.

Here are the two secret ways you can modify your Gmail Address and still get emails.

1. Append a plus ("+") sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. suppose you are having gmail address you@gmail.com, you could send or receive emails on you+friends@gmail.com or you+business@gmail.com.
2. Insert one or several dots (".") anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn't recognize periods as characters in addresses -- it just ignore them. Again suppose you have gmail address you@gmail.com, you could tell people your address as y.o.u@gmail.com or y.ou@gmail.com you can add wherever you want the dot in your username.

You will receive all emails sent to your modified gmail address at your original email address.

The most useful feature of this is to filter out emails very easily and quickly. Robby Stein explains it as

For me, the real value in being able to manipulate your email address is that it makes it really easy to filter on those variants. For example you could use hikingfan+bank@gmail.com when you sign up for online banking and then set up a filter to automatically star, archive or label emails addressed to hikingfan+bank. You can also use this when you register for a service and think they might share your information. For example, I added "+donation" when I gave money to a political organization once, and now when I see emails from other groups to that address, I know how they got it. Solution: filtered to auto-delete.

Personal Level Indicators in Gmail

Gmail again revealed a new feature called "Personal Level Indicators" which will help you to prioritize your gmails. When you enable this option, it put arrows next to messages in your inbox so you can tell if an email was addressed to you, a group, or a mailing list that you're on.

To enable this option

Click on Settings located at upper right corner. In General tab find Personal Level Indicators option then select it to Show Indicators and click on Save Changes.

You will see little arrows next to your emails.

A single arrow ("›") is automatically placed next to emails sent to you and others, and double arrows ("»") next to emails that are sent just to you. No arrow indicates this email is from mailing lists.

Give it a Try, I found this very useful.

Russian Ad for Gmail

GOS posted an interesting post which includes a video ad created by Saatchi & Saatchi Moscow to promote Gmail in Russia. I thought you might like this.

How to Suggest a Feature to add in Gmail.

Gmail always want to be the best and unique by providing great services to their users. They are constantly building and testing new features, last month they introduced a new feature, Creating personal Mailing list through Contact Manager. By the popular demand from users, they have added many features like free automated forwarding, signature options, IMAP Access.

There may be such things in your creative mind that you wish it could do, just let them know what it is with the help of Suggest a feature option. Click "Help" at the top of any page in your Gmail account. On the right side of the Gmail Help Center, you'll see a "Let us know" link in the "Suggest a feature" box.

So what your creative mind is thinking:
Want colorful background themes? or Want Gmail to do your laundry? let them know.