Gmail is going through some changes at the moment and they’re almost all positive. Recently Google announced that it was making significant improvements to how the app works on mobile, with new image view options and the “material theme” that’s now common on Google products. The company also improved how users can switch between multiple accounts.
The company also said that it’s blocking 100 million spam email pers day, which is a truly staggering number. That said, I have personally noticed the spam feature tripping up on legitimate emails – so be sure to check that folder regularly and mark real messages as spam.
The company is also making changes to the desktop version of Gmail – the one you use in your web browser at gmail.com. Most interesting is the massive improvement coming to right click options. In the past this feature was fairly limited, only offering archive, mark as read/unread or delete a message.
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You’ll now be able to do pretty much everything from the right click that you’d ever need to. Options will now include reply, reply to all, forward. The original set of options are there too, plus “move to” and function to change the label on an email.
The “move to” option is kind of weird in Gmail because everything uses labels. When you change labels it just adjusts where that email lives. But usually when you move you’re removing the “inbox” label, so while the email doesn’t move it’s just not visible from the main screen.
Labels, also now available from the right click context menu, are added in addition to other labels. So an email can be from both “google” and in the “inbox”. Other labels are hidden and allow Gmail to show you unread messages at the click of a button – or by typing is:unread in the search box.
You can also mute conversations too, making them vanish but not marking them as spam. Again, this applies a label “muted” so you can find these messages by typing is:muted in the search box – they’re not gone – nothing really is in Gmail it seems.
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You can also now right click and find all messages by the sender you click on, or with the same subject.
You can also open a message in a new window. I find this especially helpful as sometimes I like to move a message to my second screen and browse on the main one, and this means I can do that from the right click menu.
Good work Google, this is solid stuff and while I do have some gripes about how Gmail works post its big visual update I do think it’s becoming a very powerful email suite. I certainly don’t find myself missing the days of Outlook any more.
The new features will already work for most people, but the roll out is staggered. If you don’t have it yet, you will this week.
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