This is perhaps an extremely useful feature for almost everyone. Remember the time you wanted to show an image in your email inlined with the text but could not figure out how to do it? Maybe if you are a little techie/geeky, you know that you can drag n drop images or paste stuff off MS Word. But its clumsy & doesn’t seem to work all the time.

A new Gmail labs feature allows you to insert images in your emails inlined to the text. You will need to enable the feature under Labs tab in Settings.

Once enabled, while composing an email using the rich text box, you can click on the “Insert Image” button in the toolbar to insert the image. Gmail will attach the image to the message and show it inlined with the text. You can also specify an image URL from the web, however, the receiver will have to click ”Display images below” or “Always display images from …” to see images you embed using URLs. 

[via Official Gmail Blog]

Google has launched a new version of Gmail for the iPhone. This new more Ajaxy version utilizes the HTML5 library in the latest Safari browser in 2.2.1 firmware. The new features are:

1. Faster interface
2. Offline support
3. Cool floaty bar (a hot bar which appears when you select a message)
4. Improved labels

According to the Google mobile blog:

All this is achieved with aggressive caching and by leveraging new browser technologies, like HTML5 and Gears. The full impact of this new architecture isn’t visible yet, but it will enable us to significantly improve performance and quickly roll out new features in the near future. We’re really excited about the potential impact this change can bring – so excited, in fact, that our VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, shared the news and demoed these new capabilities at the February 2009 GSMA Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona and last week at Web 2.0 in San Francisco.

The new interface is available for Android and iPhones with firmware >= 2.2.1. Other users will be redirected to the old interface. Currently, it is supported in English only. Google is rolling out this in phases, so in case its still not available for you, check back later.

[Via Google Mobile Blog]

Thanks to the new exciting features  being added almost to Google Labs frequently like this & these, the Gmail header menu got too over crowded.

At this rate, imagine what it would be in an year.

A new feature has been added to Gmail labs. This one lets you undo send. It basically means that if you pressed the send button too soon, you can save the day by doing an undo.

The feature has been developed by Yuzo Fujishima, an engineer in the Google’s Tokyo office. The feature basically delays your email for 5 seconds. So, you need to be pretty fast in identifying that you screwed up. Once the email is sent (after 5 seconds), you cannot undo it. Also, the feature makes sure that your email is sent in case your browser crashes in those 5 seconds.

I remember such incidents happening to me many times when I hit the send button and immediately realize that I forgot to attach the file or I sent it to the wrong person altogether! This feature will come as a life saver for such situations.

[Via Official Gmail Blog]

This is something I have been cribbing about all the time in web based email systems. Whenever I have to attach multiple files to an email, I have to select each of them individually. Not from today.

Gmail has added a new feature which lets you select multiple files at one go from the browse window. Just hold down Ctrl (Cmd on OS X) and click on each file you want to attach to your message. You can also use Shift to select continuous list of files.

What’s more, you will also see a progress bar which tells you how much each of the file has been uploaded. A real time saver. Great for sending those family vacation pictures.

It might not be a mere coincidence that this feature is released the day after the Great Gmail Outage of 2009. I believe companies keep such highly anticipated features in standby in their pockets to save the day after such disasters.

[Via Official Gmail Blog]

Gmail is getting better and better. This one is gonna blow you away – Themes. There were a few unofficial scripts available which let you do the same, but this is totally official and super cool. Plus the initial collection is awesome. Check it out:

As usual, they are slowly rolling out to all the users. Once its activated in your account, you will find a new “Themes” tab under Settings. It will look like this:

This is just in time for the holiday season. I hope they spring up some holiday based themes there. I personally like this one (Terminal – click for a larger view):

Yeah yeah, I know. Its a bit unreadable, but hey, its the good old terminal .

[Via Official Gmail Blog, Techcrunch, Lifehacker]

The much anticipated Gmail feature you have been waiting for is here. Gmail now supports voice and video chat from within the browser. This feature is available now to all the users worldwide. Using this feature, you can voice and video chat for free in the Gmail’s chat window.

To enable the feature, go to http://www.gmail.com/videochat and click on the “Install” button. The plugin will be installed and will ask you to restart your browser (In case your browser is not restarted automatically, you should do it manually). Login to Gmail and open a chat window with the person you want to have voice or video chat with. you will see there is a “Video & more” button instead of the regular “Options” button. Click on the new button and select “Start video chat” or “Start voice chat”. You can switch to a full screen view or pop out the chat window and change the size and positioning as you wish.

In case you do not have a webcam, you can still have voice conversations alongside your email and regular chat. You can click the “pop-out” icon to make the video larger, or click the fullscreen icon in the upper left-hand corner for a fully immersive experience.

Take a look at this short video to see more:

Thinking about buying a webcam? There are some models available at discount here: http://www.google.com/mail/help/videochat/learnmore.html

[Via Official Google Blog, Official Gmail Blog]

Gmail is getting better day by day. Starting today, Gmail supports emoticons. To use this feature, one must compose an email with Rich Text Formatting enabled. Here is what it looks like in a Gmail compose screen:

You can choose from sets of square or circular emoticons. Also, a new set has been added to the chat window and it looks great:

[Via Official Gmail Blog]

Google launched a new version of Gmail for mobile for J2ME supported and Blackberry phones. The new version is faster and more reliable in low signal areas and supports basic offline access on phones like the Nokia N95, Sony Ericsson W910i, and BlackBerry Curve in addition to allowing access to multiple Gmail or Google Apps email accounts from the same application.

In addition, the new version supports multiple mobile email drafts and shortcut keys for QWERTY keyboard phones. This version also supports 35 languages. Though not all the new features are available in all the languages.

Here is a video detailing the features in the new version:

Go to m.google.com/mail in your mobile browser to download the new Gmail for mobile for your phone.

[Via Official Google Blog]