Gmail Podcast

Category: Gmail Blog

  • Offline

    I have to admit I was excited to hear about the Gmail Labs feature simply called Offline. The offline feature allows you to use Gmail when you are offline or on a flakey internet connection. To get started with Gmail Offline, begin by going to Settings> Labs. You’ll first need to enable the offline feature and save your settings.You should now see the “offline” icon as a little green circle, or the words “offline” in the upper right by the settings link. Click on this link and walk through the steps of installing Google Gears. Once the installation is complete you make need to restart your browser – the installer will tell you if you need to do so.

    The process will then begin to synchronize your online folder with a local copy that you can use when you are not online. You can hide the status window at any time by clicking the “X” in the upper right corner of the small window. To see it again, click the little green circle again. The sych process will take a while. In my case it took about 20 minutes.

    From the sync pop-up you can also take some additional actions including:

    • “Sync Now” to resynchronize your offline folder immediately,
    • pause the sync for the next hour, which is always handy if you are in a limited bandwidth situation
    • Disable oflfine Gmail, which allows you a quick way to turn off the offline system
    • and Offline settings – this goes directly to the Settings> Offline tab where you can:
    • Enable/disable offline mode (yes, this is redundant)
    • Set the date range – allowing you to set how far back you want to keep online data locally. By default this is about six months, depending on the number of messages and their size
    • Specify the maximum attachment size – which allows you to limit the synchronization of large file attachments. By default this is unlimited.
    • Create a desktop shortcut
    • and a link to a troubleshooting page to help you out if you have any problems.

    I ran this on my Windows machine under Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 and it worked fine in both situations.

    Using the offline feature allows you to use Gmail in your browser, read, compose, and even archive messages without an internet connection. When you get back online, the changes you made offline will be available online, and new messages on the server will be downloaded automatically without you doing anything special. This really is a useful feature if you use Gmail a lot like I do.

    Here’s today’s quick tip:

    Listener Dan Johnson Jr. made me aware of a Phishing attempt via email targeted directly at Gmail users. Phishing, with “ph” is an attempt by someone to gain access to your secured information. In this case, someone is trying to get in to your Gmail account. The message indicates that your Gmail account is scheduled to be deleted. The email asks you for your user name, password, date of birth, and country. If you ever see an email asking for this type of information use the “Report Phishing” option on the “Reply” pulldown on the right side of a message so Gmail can prevent similar messages in the future.

    One other little cosmetic change to Gmail that I hadn’t noticed earlier was the status bar when doing file attachments. Now when you specify a file attachment an animated gauge will display showing you how much of the attachment has been uploaded. While not necessary, it is a nice touch.

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download

  • Multiple Inboxes

    One of the most interesting new features in the Gmail Labs is called Multiple Inboxes. If you need more information on Gmail Labs, check the Gmail Podcast Archives for plenty of details on what it is and how you can enable dozens of useful features. Multiple inboxes gives you a very nice way to see items that would normally be cluttering up your inbox in separate window panes on the same screen. Combined with labels and filters, multiple inboxes makes for a very powerful organization tool.

    Begin by enabling the Multiple Inboxes feature under Settings> Labs. You’ll notice your main conversation index now shows a sort of split-screen view of your normal conversation index as well as search results on the right. By default it comes up with search results for starred and draft items. To change this, go back in to Settings and you’ll see a new tab labeled “Multiple inboxes”. There you will see five lines, labeled “Pane 0-4” that you can put in the search conditions you want to display. You can also set a maximum number of conversations you want to display and if you want the panes displayed above, below, or to the right of the inbox. Now, back at your inbox, you’ll see a whole new layout. Using filters, you can immediately label and move messages to their own window for better organization.

    At the top of each pane you can find a link on the right labeled “View All”. When you click on that link the particular pane will take over and take up the whole index.

    Be careful not to get carried away with Multiple Inboxes. While they can be a powerful feature to keep you organized, I found the more I tried to configure them with filters, the less organized I became. I thought it would be helpful to take some of my more common messages and bypass the normal inbox by applying them to a label and making them appear in one of the other inboxes. For example, all my incoming notifications from Facebook would simply “appear” in a facebook pane. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a keyboard shortcut to move me to another pane (yet). Maybe something like g 0-4 would be helpful to allow me to select, label, archive, and delete conversations in those other inboxes. Try out the multiple inboxes and see what works for you.

    I have to say, I’m rather impressed with some of the other changes in Gmail recently. The user interface has been cleaned up and a couple new features added. The buttons on the main index have been given cleaner look. Archive, Report Spam, and Delete are still there, however More Actions has been divided in to “Move to”, which allows you to apply a label and move the message out of the inbox, and label which simply applies a label. “More Actions” is still available, but has been tidied up to simply include “Mark as read”, “Mark as unread”, “Add to tasks”, “Add Star”, “Remove Star”, “Create an event”, “Filter Messages like these”, and “Mute”. For you keyboard shortcut nerds, “v” activates the “Move To” menu, “l” for the label menu, and “.” (period, or dot) still gets “More Actions”. It’s been a challenge to retrain my fingers, but I’m learning.

    I’ve got dozens of labels and scrolling is quickly becoming impractical. Another nice feature about these new menu options is auto-complete. As you start typing the label name, Gmail will narrow the search down. Once again, I highly recommend keyboard shortcuts for moving between your messages with j and k, select them with “x”, move or label them with “l”, or “v”, archive them with “y”, or delete them with “#”. Applying labels with auto-complete makes organizing your messages a snap. I can quickly narrow down 100 new messages to 10 that I really need to read and reply to in a few minutes.

    After seeing some of the recent interface changs, it starts to make the filter and label management screens look a little clunky. Keep watching the Gmail Podcast website and listening to the Gmail Podcast, you never know what’s coming next…

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download

  • Tasks

    It seems like Gmail is more and more becoming the online version of Microsoft Outlook. In mid-December they added Tasks to the list of features available in the Gmail labs. Tasks are a way to keep track of what you need to do and what you’ve already done.

    To begin working with Gmail tasks, click on the little green bottle in the upper right. This is really just a shortcut to Settings> Labs. Next, click on the button labeled “Enable” and scroll to the bottom of the screen and click “Save Changes”.

    Once back at the main Gmail screen, take a look on the left. Just under Contacts, you will see a link labeled “Tasks”. When you click it, an embedded window will pop up with your tasks. You can also get this window by using the keyboard shortcut “G” then “K” (short for Goto tasK). Be sure you have keyboard shortcuts turned on by going in to Settings> General and enable keyboard shortcuts.

    The first time you bring up the tasks window, the list will be empty. If you have some tasks on your mind, you can simply type them in and hit enter after each task to enter the next one. On the right side of each task you will see a little chevron symbol. Clicking that will bring up additional details about the task, allowing you to put in a due date, or add additional notes. For example, I’ve got a trip coming up and I need to get a few things done. One of the tasks I’ll enter is to sign up for an ID card. I enter the task “Sign up for ID card”, then click the chevron to set a date. In the notes section, I’ll enter the web address where I need to go to enter the ID information.

    Once I have completed a task I simply click on the checkbox to mark it complete.

    There are lots of other options on the task list window. Like a chat window, you can minimize and maximize the window, and make the task list an independent browser window by clicking on the arrow icon in the upper right of the list. If you wanted it embedded again, click the link on the bottom of the new window labeled “Pop-in”.

    On the bottom is a link called Actions. From here you can manage your tasks by moving them up down, or changing the indent level. Of course, I recommend using the keyboard shortcuts which are clearly labeled next to the action for fastest manipulation of your tasks. Indenting allows you to see your tasks in more of an outline format, but does not create any dependencies to the heirarchy that I’m aware of.

    Also on the bottom of the window are icons to add and delete tasks and one of my favorites, the list menu. From here you can refresh a list, add, rename, select, or delete a list – giving you the power to keep your tasks for different projects or topics in separate lists. Just keep in mind that you can only view one list of tasks at a time.

    I did find one bug in the embedded task window when used with “Labels on Right” labs feature enabled. When I click to the right of the Actions label, I can click “through” the tasks window and get whatever label is underneath. In my case it was all the email I had labeled for the upcoming trip.

    Now for some real power. Let’s say you are reading an email and recognize you need to take some action on it. Previously, what I would do is label it with something like “@Actions”. It took a couple keystrokes and was fairly effective. Now, while reading the email, I can either use the “More actions” and select “Add to tasks” or type Shift-T to have it added to the task list. The subject is used as the task name. Shift-Enter will show me any details of the task, including a link back to the related email. Even if I archive the email, I can still find it quickly using the task list.

    There is one thing I found lacking with the multiple lists. Shift-T will add the email to which ever task list was last selected. If I had a work project list selected when I added the task to get an ID card, I have no way to move it to the right list. This seems like a simple thing for Google to fix with a drop down list, much like using multiple calendars. If you are only using one task list, however, you have nothing to worry about.

    Also lacking is a widget to see the tasks in a sidebar, much like Google Docs, or Calendar. That would seem to be a logical place for a quick glance. For a 1.0 product, it’s not bad for a simple list. Hopefully Google will adopt some of the early suggestions in ot their next release.

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download

  • Calendar

    Yes, you heard right. This episode is about the Google Calendar. I’m not running out of Gmail information, on the contrary, I’m having a hard time keeping up with all the cool new stuff coming out. Recently I found a new feature that ties Gmail with the Google Calendar.

    To begin, I’d like to give you a wonderful use of the Google Calendar that my co-worker Kevin in Raleigh North Carolina told me about. He said that he keeps all his appointments outside normal work hours in his Google Calendar. This way he can share it with his wife and maintain it from anywhere. I started thinking about our family calendar that hangs on the refrigerator at home. There are some drawbacks to this simple, and somewhat effective means of family communication. First, there isn’t always room to write what you want so you have to make shorthand notations, which can be difficult for your spouse to decipher. Second, you cannot check the piece of paper at home if someone at work asks “Are you available next Tuesday evening?”

    This past weekend, I took the three sheets of paper from the refrigerator and entered them in to Google Calendar. I will spare you all the details of setting up and managing a calendar. However, I will let you know that I discovered quite a number of nice features such as notifications via email and SMS, as well as sending a daily agenda to my email box each day just before I wake up – saving me a step of reading my email and reviewing my calendar each morning before we get going.

    Next, I shared the calendar with my wife Donna and gave her access to modify it. Finally, to appease Donna, I printed out not only a monthly view, but a weekly view as well to better see conflicts. After all, what good is a new piece of technology if you don’t have a process to drive it. I’ll be out of town and she isn’t quite comfortable with managing the calendar from the web yet.

    OK, you may be saying “Chuck, I’ve been doing that with our family calendar for years. What took you so long?” To that I respond “Thanks” and admit I’m not always on the leading edge of all technologies.

    OK, here’s the tie in with Gmail. I discovered a Gmail labs feature called “Google Calendar gadget” which displays upcoming events in a window on the left side. There is also one called “Google Docs gadget” to display recently modified Google Docs. The problem is that they appear at the bottom below the chat window and labels so I couldn’t glance and see what is coming up in the calendar. Fortunately, there are also two gadgets called “Right side chat” and “Right side labels” to place those two gadgets on the right side of the screen. This does make the message index a little narrower, and takes a bit of getting used to when looking for the labels or chat – after all they’ve been in the same place for years. However, the calendar and docs gadget now appear right under the Contacts link on the left and offer a quick glance at useful information.

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download

  • Video Chat

    It was only a matter of time before Google integrated video in to their GoogleTalk protocol and made it available directly from Gmail. Well, now you can talk face to face with your friends with voice and video without leaving Gmail.

    The first step is to ensure you have a camera and the proper drivers installed. If your camera is built in to your machine, you likely don’t have anything to worry about at this point. If, like me, you use a USB camera and move it from machine to machine, you’ll want to go to the manufacturer’s site and download the latest drivers.

    Next, you will need to install a tiny bit of software from Google on your machine. Start by going to http://mail.google.com/videochat and clicking on the button labeled “Install voice and video chat”. From the looks of it, this is for Windows XP and later users. Keep an eye on the site and keep listening to the Gmail Podcast for updates.

    The installer takes only a few seconds, however it does require that you restart your browser. Once restarted, you will be brought to your Gmail settings with the Chat configuration settings listed. In the listing, you will find a new section labeled “Voice and video chat”. Make sure things are working right by clicking on the link “Verify your settings”. If everything is working, you should see your camera image in the window. If not, try troubleshooting your settings with the link of the same name. As a friendly tip, mine was not working right at first. I simply checked to make sure the camera was selected, changed the microphone to the camera, and hit save settings. When I went back to the chat settings and verified, everything was working fine.

    Now when you sign in to Gmail chat, you will see a camera icon next to your name and be able to do a video chat with others. If you start a text chat, you can use the link “Video and more” to start a video session. It’s simple and fun.

    Here’s today’s quick tip: If you find yourself answering the same questions or fending off the same vendors many times, then the Canned Auto Repsonses feature in the Gmail Labs may be for you. You can enable this by going in to the Gmail Labs under Settings or clicking on the little green bottle next to the Settings link in the upper right corner. Once enabled, a new link labeled “Canned autoresponses” will appear just below the To field. Initially there aren’t any responses so when you click on the link the only option will be “New canned response”. Type in your message, for example “Sorry, I’m extremely busy right now. In fact, I only have time for this canned autoresponse. I will respond with a more meaningful message when the stack of things to work gets back to a reasonable chaos. Stay tuned…” then click “New autoresponse”. Answer the prompt to give your canned response a name – like “Extremely busy” and click “OK”. The next time you need to tell someone you are busy click “Canned autoresponse” and select “extremely busy” to have the text automatically typed in.

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download

  • Labs 2

    There have been several additions to the Gmail Labs since I originally told you about it in June of 2008. If you haven’t listened to that podcast, I recommend you go back and listen to it to better understand what Gmail Labs is and how to use these terrific extensions to the software.

    One of the new features is called “Mail Goggles”. The idea behind it is that it gives you time to gather your senses before sending and email you might regret. By default, Mail Goggles is enabled late at night when you are most likely to send an angry email to your boss, or a message to your ex-girlfriend wishing you had gotten back together. To enable Mail Googles, click on the “Settings” link in the upper right, then the “Labs” tab. Scroll down until you see “Mail Goggles” and enable it. Mail Googles works by making you do a few simple math problems before you can send your mail. The idea is that if you aren’t in the right mind to do some simple brain work, you aren’t in the right mind to be sending that email to your ex-girlfriend.

    Another new feature in the labs is Advanced IMAP Controls. This is handy to use if you find your mail client getting bogged down by a large Gmail “All Mail” folder for example. Once enabled, just go to the “Labels” tab under “Settings” and you’ll find a new checkbox next to your labels that reads “Show in IMAP”. Uncheck the box and the corresponding folder will disappear from IMAP.

    There are also some more obscure options for those of you who want to make Gmail’s IMAP work more like traditional IMAP providers: you can turn off auto-expunge or trash messages when they’re no longer visible through IMAP.

    The IMAP protocol allows messages to be marked for deletion, a sort of limbo state where a message is still present in the folder but slated to be deleted the next time the folder is expunged. In Gmail’s standard IMAP implementation, when you mark a message as deleted, Gmail doesn’t let it linger in that state — it deletes (or auto-expunges) it from the folder right away. If you want the two-stage delete process, after you’ve enabled the Advanced IMAP Controls, just select ‘Do not automatically expunge messages’ under the ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’ tab in Settings.

    Here’s today’s Quick Tip. If you like sending short messages where the subject IS the message – like “Call me right away”, and don’t want to be annoyed by that pop up message that says “Send this message without text in the body?” – use EOM (short for End Of Message) or enclose it in parenthesis and Gmail will no longer bother you.

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download

  • Not Spam

    One of the main reasons I, and many others, love Gmail is for its excellent spam filtering capabilities. Spam is a term used for those annoying advertisements typically regarding your health or finance. In some cases this content can be as high as 90% of your email traffic. Gmail does a pretty good job at automatically recognizing this type of content and moves from your inbox to a separate location labeled “Spam”. However, nothing is foolproof and every once in a while a conversation ends up in the spam folder by mistake.

    Fortunately, there is a quick and easy way to retrieve the email and identify it as a valid message; at the same time have Gmail learn not to make the mistake again. By clicking the Spam link on the left you will be shown all the conversations that have been identified as questionable content.

    At the top of the conversation index, you’ll see a couple buttons. The first is labeled “Delete forever”. This moves any selected conversations to the Trash folder. After 30 days they are completely removed from the system.

    The second button is labeled “Not Spam”. By selecting one or more conversations and then clicking “Not Spam”, the content will be moved back to your Inbox and Gmail will learn not to make the same mistake.

    If you are Gmail search savvy, there’s a catch to this. First, click on the Spam link on the left and take a look at the search box at the top of the screen. See how it says “in:spam”? As of this writing there is a minor bug in Gmail. If you type the search “in:spam” manually, you will be brought to a standard search results screen which does not have a “Not Spam” button. Ironically, you are now looking at all the mail that has been tagged as spam, but you still have the option to report it as spam with the “Report Spam” button. Hopefully Google will correct this oversight at some point.

    Here’s today’s quick tip: If you have used the Gmail contacts to create groups of people, you can type the group name and address multiple recipients with one single label. For example, if I want to send my entire family an email, and I have created a group called “Tomasi family”, I can compose a new message and use the address “Tomasi family” in the To, Cc, or Bcc line for quicker addressing.

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download

  • The Bottom Line

    It helps to step back and take a look at the Gmail interface once in a while – you never know what you’ll see that you hadn’t spotted before. This week I took a close look at the bottom center of the screen. While I was familiar with some of the items, I notice something new. I also realized that I hadn’t discussed any of these items with you. So let’s go through them together.

    Just below the blue bar that indicates the end of the conversation index or currently viewed conversation you should see several lines of text. The first is a helpful hint, such as common keyboard shortcuts, the fact that you can forward your mail to one Gmail account, or noting the availability of Gmail in multiple languages. These messages change every few minutes so don’t forget to glance down there from time to time for a bit of new information. You can typically find out more on these items by clicking on the Help link in the upper right corner of the Gmail screen.

    The next line of information, in green, is the amount of space you have available and how much of that is being consumed. This is always handy to know – like looking at the fuel gauge on your car now and then. If I’ve learned anything from using Gmail over the past several years, this amount also changes – it goes up, so don’t forget to take a look.

    I don’t know when Google decided to add the next line of information, but I noticed it only recently – and I like it. It tells you when the latest activity was on your Gmail account. What’s more, if you’re running Gmail from multiple computers, it will tell you when and where it was accessed. This is a great security feature and kind of fascinating too. I was using Gmail at work and noticed it said there was one other connection to this account. I clicked on the Details link and it said it was my home IP address. This made sense because I often leave the web interface running at home. If I had seen something suspicious, I could have clicked a link and sign out all other sessions – leaving my current connection at work still working. Since there are multiple ways to access Gmail, there is a log of other connections from web, mobile, IMAP, or POP. Check these periodically to make sure it coincides with your use habits. If not, I recommend you change your Gmail password as soon as possible.

    Just under the connection information is a line that allows you to change the method in which Gmail is displayed. Most of the time, the software detects what browser you have and the interface is rendered appropriately. The links at the bottom allow you to change between standard view with extended capabilities, basic HTML – which works on older browsers, and even turn off the chat interface on the left hand side. For more information, click the link labeled Learn More on the line second from the bottom.

    And finally, at the very bottom of the screen, is the copyright, a link to the Google Blog – with plenty of articles about Gmail from the developers themselves, a link to be part of the Gmail team – complete with pictures and job descriptions, and finally a link to what else? – the Google home page.

    Whether you have listened to every Gmail Podcast or just getting started, I encourage you to explore every facet of every screen in Gmail and experiment. Like me, you’ll discover that it is so much more than an inbox.

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download

  • Gmail Labs

    The people at Google have found a creative way to let you try various experimental features of Gmail and provide feedback. They call it Gmail Labs. You can access these new features by clicking on the Settings link in the upper right, and then clicking on the tab labeled “Labs”. Some of these features are cosmetic such as date formats or removing the number of new messages from the various locations where messages are stored; others provide improved capabilities or time saving features like customizable keyboard shortcuts. Have a look in the Labs tab of the settings screen from time to time and see if there is anything of interest that might improve your Gmail experience.

    You can choose to enable or disable any of them by using the appropriate radio button choice to the right of each option. When you’ve chosen which features to turn on or off, click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the screen.

    According to the help page, there are a few things to keep in mind when you try these features out. First, they may break at any time. Remember, this is experimental software. Second, they may be removed from the feature set at any time. And third, they may work so well, that they may be promoted to regular features in Gmail.

    If you use any of the Labs features and suspect you are having problems, you can temporarily disable them by modifying your web address, or URL, to https://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0.

    Feel free to provide feedback, report bugs, or suggest new features to Google by joining the Google group gmail-labs. Look under the “More” menu at the top of the screen for Groups, or follow the link in the show notes for this episode on the website.

    Here’s a comment from listener Douglas E. Welch over at Technology IQ. It seems he had a stuck key on his keyboard and as a result, inadvertantly locked out his Gmail account “up to 24 hours” due to invalid access attempts. As Douglas stated in his blog posting, “It is a little distressing that a rather simple computer malfunction can result in a day-long lockout and the fact that there is no appeal process for such a lockout.”. Hopefully Google will remedy the situation and provide some sort of support mechanism for accidental technical difficults such as this in the future.

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download

  • Contacts Sync with Mac Address Book

    Before I dig in to this I would like to thank my long time friend, co-worker, and mentor, Scott Reynolds for passing on this wonderful tip for Gmail. Those of you with iPhones, Macs and Gmail will find this very helpful.

    This is based on a recent article at googlemac.blogspot.com showing how you can sync your Mac address book with your Google contacts.

    Before you start, we strongly recommend that you back up your Mac Address Book. You can do that in the File menu by choosing Export, Addressbook Archive. That way if anything goes wrong, you’ll still have your original data.

    The key to syncing your Google contacts is in the Mac Address Book. Go to the Address Book menu, choose Preferences. Under the General heading, at the bottom of the screen check the box that says “Synchronize with Google”. It will ask you for your Google login and password – use the credentials you normally use to get access to your Gmail.

    Now start up iSync under the Mac Applications menu. Click “Sync Devices”. Depending on how many contacts you have, it may take a few minutes to synchronize all the changes. When it’s done, click on the Card menu and select “Look for duplicates”. You can resolve conflicts one at a time by choosing which card you want to take precedence, or you can merge the changes by highlighting one or more cards and click “Merge cards” or using the keyboard shortcut Cmd-Shift-| (that’s a verticle pipe character).

    Click “Sync Devices” one more time and your contacts in your Mac Address Book and Google contacts are now in sync. To keep things in sync in the future, just use iSync periodically. It’s a bit manual, but once setup, it’s only a couple mouse clicks away.

    Here’s today’s quick tip: Fiona King over at collegedegrees.com has posted an article titled “57 tips of highly effective Gmail users“. If you’re a long time listener to the Gmail Podcast you’ll recognize many of these and I encourage you to go over and take a look – there are some great nuggets of information like backing up your messages, cleaning out your contacts, or tricking out your labels.

    If you’ve got a great idea or heard about a new feature in Gmail, or something that works with or enhances Gmail, I’d love to hear from you. Visit the website at chuckchat.com or drop me an email at gpodcast@gmail.com.

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download