Today Google rolled out a nifty little feature for Gmail users – Desktop notifications for email and chat. It lets you know when you receive a new email or chat message. Read more…
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Quick-Tip
Some time back we showed you how you can undo an already sent email in Gmail – to give you a second chance to review the email again. Now, Google has rolled out another great feature that lets you restore your contacts to a specified date and time in case you accidently delete or modify them.
To restore contacts, click ‘Contacts‘ in the left pane. Then, click ‘More Actions…‘ button > ‘Restore contacts…‘. Select time to restore contacts to that particular date. Simple as that.
Also see: How to undo a sent email in Gmail.
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In spite of not providing unlimited storage space like Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, Gmail is the favorite choice for most of us. It is a primary email service provider for most people and hence the problem of running out of space in Gmail bound to happen for most of us, sooner or later. The only thing one can do is to remove the emails that take up lot of space. These are mostly forwards with lots of multimedia attachments. You don’t want that. But the problem is, there is no easy way to sort emails according to size in Gmail (this was my favorite feature when I used Yahoo! Mail back in the day). So it becomes rather impossible to hand-pick the larger ones.
However, there is a cool service called FindBigMail which is nothing short of a bliss. As the name suggests, it scans your Gmail account and separates out mail with large attachments.
Once the scan completes, you need to login to your Gmail account and look for labels marked ‘My Big Mail‘, ‘My Really Big Mail‘, ‘My Ultra Big Mail‘. This is where you can easily select the large emails and delete them.
The service also sends an email with stats about how much space your can recover by deleting those emails. Try it now.
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I use Thunderbird as my offline email client and it’s been a really smooth ride since more than a year. But recently I ran an update [3.1.2] and restarted my PC only to find myself not able to connect to Gmail [using IMAP] on Thunderbird 3.1.2. Turns out the issue lies with Google’s servers. They have been changed. I don’t know whether this affects every offline email client (well, it should) but here’s a quick workaround to fix the problem.
» In Thunderbird, open Tools > Account Settings… > [your Gmail account] > Server settings. Change the Server name to ‘imap.gmail.com‘ (previously the server was imap.googlemail.com).
» Then in the left pane, click ‘Outgoing Server (SMTP)’ edit the server name to ‘smtp.gmail.com’. Click OK.
» Now try to reconnect again. It will work.
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Today Google Labs came up with pretty decent feature for Gmail that lets you move the attachments column showing the different icons for each attachment to far left. This makes more sense because now its much more visible and easy to identify emails with attachments.
Such small enhancements from time to time make Gmail better and better. You can enable the ‘Move Icon Column’ feature in some simple steps.
1) Login to your Gmail account. Click the Google Labs icon 
located top tight.
2) From the list, ‘Enable’ the ‘Move Icon Column’ feature and click ‘Save settings…’ button at the end of the page.
Now your attachments column will be located to the left hand side where its much more noticeable.
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So you are a high profile secret agent and need to send a really secure email to your party ;), you might want to try OneTimeMessage – a web-service that lets you send self-destructing emails to your friends.
There is no sign-up required. Just put in your and the recipient’s name and email address, write your secret message and send it. You might want to set additional options to send you a message when your email is read and when to destroy the message in case it remains unread.
The system then gives you a ‘key’ which you need to send to the recipient by any means of communication. Once the recipient reads the message, it destroys itself automatically within 5 minutes. I have used it and it’s really great.
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Beginner Tip
This feature has been around for a while but if you are a new Gmail user you may not be knowing it. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you just regret hitting that “Send” button too soon? You just click it absentmindedly and the very next second you feel the sky all over your head. The mail’s already been sent and all you can do now is to face-palm.
While I can’t help you with your absentmindedness, I can surely tell you a way how to ‘unsend’ or undo that sent message. There is a very cool feature in Gmail Labs called ‘Undo Send’ which does what it says. It displays an ‘Undo’ link right after you send a message from Gmail.
Of course there’s a small trick here if you care to know. After enabling this feature, when you click ‘Send’, the message is not delivered at that very moment. Instead, it keeps the message on hold and displays the link ’Undo’ for few seconds. If you do not click the ‘Undo’ link within that small period of time, it assumes that you are present-minded and proceeds to send the message that was kept on hold.
Enabling the ‘Undo Send’ feature in Gmail:
» Login to your Gmail account and click the ‘Gmail Labs’ icon 
in the top-right corner.
» From the list of features, find the ‘Undo Send’ feature and ‘Enable’ it. Click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom.
That’s it! Enjoy 
UPDATE: Now you can even set the time-out for the cancellation period to a maximum of 20 seconds. Go to ‘Settings‘ > ‘General‘. Now set the ‘Undo Send’ preferences. 
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