E-MAIL - WEBMAIL - 21.03.2011

Handy new features or extensions in Gmail

Delegate your inbox

Gmail now makes it possible to allow someone else to handle your e-mails, for instance when you’re temporarily absent or ill. This means that you can temporarily allow another person (who should also have a Gmail account) to read your e-mail, delete messages and send messages in your name. This person obviously isn’t allowed to modify your account settings and your password. To delegate your Gmail account to someone else, open the Gmail settings, click on the Accounts and Import tab and specify next to the Grant access to your account option which other Gmail user (for instance your partner) should be allowed access. This person will receive an e-mail containing a link allowing them to take over your inbox. When logging in to Gmail, they will see both their own and your inbox. You can, of course, withdraw this permission to access your inbox at any time.

News in Gmail Labs

Change your mind. In your Gmail settings, the Labs link points to handy but still experimental Gmail functions. A new one is the Undo Send function. It ensures that Gmail will wait 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds before actually sending your e-­mail. This gives you some time after hitting the Send button to stop a message which you immediately regret having sent.

Defaults and Sneak Peek. When you exchange lots of e-mails with many contacts at the same time, the Default “Reply to All” functionensures that all recipients are by default selected when you reply to a message. And if you often have to send the same replies, Canned Responses lets you save a number of often-used messages to send as a reply straightaway. You can even configure rules for having these standard replies sent fully automatically. You can now also define your own hotkeys by means of the Custom Keyboard Shortcuts function. And by enabling Message Sneak Peek you can read the first couple of lines of an e-mail without opening the message itself.

Tip. If you’ve tried a Gmail Labs function and you don’t like it, you can disable it at any time.

External extensions

Which one is largest? There are also external websites which add extra Gmail options. For instance, FindBigMail (https://www.findbigmail.com) lets you find out which of your Gmail messages are biggest and gobble up most free space, so that you can remove them. To do so, FindBigMail is given access to your Gmail inbox temporarily (without having to give your password) and only the size of the message is transferred to the service, not the content. NudgeMail (http://www.nudgemail.com) lets you send e-mail reminders to yourself simply by sending a Gmail message to Nudgemail.

Information about the sender. The browser add-on Rapportive (http://rapportive.com) adds an extra pane to your Gmail inbox containing information about the sender of an e-mail. This is based on the information which this service retrieves from social sites, such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

On schedule. And the Boomerang browser add-­on (http://www.boomeranggmail.com) lets you schedule an e-mail to be sent later, for instance a message with birthday wishes arriving exactly on time.