NathanHJones.comjust thinking outloud

The Gmail team has been rolling out feature after feature lately (well, if you’re using IE7 or Firefox 2) and they finally added something I’ll use on a daily basis.

You now have the ability to remain ‘invisible’ while chatting through the Gmail interface. This allows you to initiate all conversations with the people you want since nobody else can see that you’re online. No more pesky work related IMs!

If you’re one of those people that occasionally uses both Gmail (where I’m always logged in to chat) and the Google Talk desktop application be careful. Since the Google Talk application doesn’t support ‘invisible’ mode yet, if you’re logged into both your status will show up as online even if you’re set as ‘invisible’ in Gmail Chat.

Here’s a quick shot of ‘invisible’ mode in action…

My addiction to Gmail continues today (official post was last Thursday) as they roll out a ‘new’ feature – group mailing lists. The group feature isn’t exactly new, I’ve had group assignments in my Gmail contact list for about a year now but now I can send an email to everyone in a group without having to remember everyones name…let alone making sure I got email addresses right.

Getting set up is extremely easy, I had a new group with members set up and ready to email (test group for my screenshot) in roughly two minutes. I’ve got a couple different groups but they’re useful for family and friends.  Makes sending out the family news a whole lot easier.

When sending an email all you have to do is start typing the group name and Gmail will populate the email addresses for everyone in the group.

Sorry everyone, this is only available for IE7 and Firefox 2 or newer.

A couple weeks ago Gmail added some real slick functionality to their web-based version (Sorry, Firefox and IE7 only I believe). I’m a huge Gmail supporter (I’ve been a user since they first opened up shop) and love the flexibility it offers – especially now that they support IMAP which I can get on my mobile phone. And sticking with standard Google practice – that’s free too!

Gmail ‘labels’ already beat the standard folder approach to email simply because it allows you to organize/archive emails in several buckets rather than just a single folder. As many of you have probably experienced, emails tend to involve multiple topics and it can be difficult to remember which folder you may have saved individual emails in. However, with labels you can tag an email with as many topics as you wish which makes organizing much cleaner. I know you could copy the email and place it into several folders but that would cause your email account size to grow at rates that often out pace storage space growth.

The color-coding of labels now lets me organize my inbox even further and provides a way for me to visually determine what requires my attention. I’ve got everything from to-do lists (depicted below) to family members designated with specific colors. To automate the process even further I’ve created a few rules – mostly for reoccurring topics of conversation – to tag emails as they are received.

Here is a shot of the color-coded labels in action.

Just another reason why Gmail wins my email business.