10 hidden Gmail features you must try

Gmail is an attractive powerful email service, but you can still find all sorts of goodies and extra features in Gmail Labs. The list is pretty massive, so we have narrowed down our 10 favourite Lab features to help improve your email productivity.

Here is over to 10 hidden Gmail features you must try or Gmail Labs features you should enable right now.

Undo send

We have all been there: You spend ½ an hour writing a strongly worded letter, hit send, and realize you maybe should not have done that. Thankfully, Gmail’s Undo Send feature — available in Gmail Labs — is there to save you from yourself.

After sending an email, Gmail will wait a predefined number of seconds 5, 10, 20, or 30, configurable in Gmail’s settings before sending. During this period, you can hit the “Undo” button to take back the mistake.

Even if you do not foresee needing it, it is a lot better than yanking out your Ethernet cable, so you might as well keep it around just in case. I use it far more than I had like to admit.

Preview external services in messages

Gmail has fairly a few labs that let you preview things like videos, documents, voicemails, and images in emails if they are sent from sure services. For example, if one of your contacts sends you a message with an address in it, the Google Maps Preview Lab will mechanically show you that address on a map.

There are also preview Labs for the Google Voice, Yelp, and Picasa if you or your contacts use those services.

Auto-advance

If you cycle through a lot of messages at once, it is maybe really irritating that Gmail takes you back to the inbox when you delete, archive, or mute a conversation.

The Auto-advance feature, available in Gmail Labs, lets you choose what Gmail does in this situation, so you can go straight to the next or previous email when you delete or archive a message.

It is small, but a good time saver and a fix for a pretty big annoyance.

Unread message icon

Gmail is tabs strength light up when you have new messages, but if you want a quick glance at how many unread emails are in the inbox, Gmail Labs’ Unread Message Icon will do the trick.

It is perfect for keeping Gmail in the pinned tab, but make sure it does not sidetrack you: after all, you should not be answering email as soon as it comes in. So if having it on tempts you to constantly check the inbox, keep it off.

Send & Archive

Just head into the Gmail’s General Settings and click the ‘Show ‘Send & Archive’ button in reply’ radio button. From now on, when you are composing an email, you can send the message and archive the thread in one fell swoop-keeping your inbox clean and tidy.

Apps search

If you use Google Docs or Google Sites, Apps Search available in Labs is a great feature that enlarges Gmail’s search capabilities to those 2 apps. That way, when you search for something in Gmail, it will also bring up matching search results from Docs and Sites below the Gmail ones.

That method you can do all your Google-related work in one, combined tab.

Default ‘Reply All’

debatably the most contentious feature of the group, this lets you set the default reply action to “Reply All” instead of “Reply”. frequently, when multiple people are involved in an email thread, one person will break off by by chance hitting the “Reply” button instead of “Reply All”, and then everyone else misses that part of the conversation.

Save yourself from being that person by tweaking this option in Gmail’s general settings. On the occasions you want to reply just to one person, you’ll still be able to do so by hitting the dropdown menu next to the Reply All button.

Canned responses

If you find yourself doing a lot of recurring typing, the Canned Responses lab will save you serious time. allow it in Gmail Labs, type in the messages you find yourself sending over and over again, and then send them in the future with click of a button. You can still send them mechanically using filters, which makes for a useful vacation responder.

Note also that you can use operating system-wide text expansion if you need to do this outside of Gmail — though Gmail’s canned responses can be used no matter what computer you’re on. They’re even available on your phone.