Boost Your Gmail Experience With Google Labs

It’s well hidden, but worth the effort to find. For all you Gmail users out there you might want to take a gander at the settings interface and clicking on the “Labs” tab. Doing so will bring up a laundry list of some very cool features that can enhance your Gmail experience. To be clear, these are browser independent, so everyone gets the benefit.

Here are a few that I’m currently using.

Superstars
Up til now we’ve only had the yellow stars to add to messages. Well, this feature gives you a few more choices: blue star, red star, red bang, and green check mark. Now you can put a little more meaning behind these icons and make your inbox a little more productive.

Mouse Gestures
I don’t know if this conflicts with other mouse gesture plugins for Firefox (it may just depend on how you have them configured), but this is a very cool feature enabling you to move forward and backward when reading messages. Just right-click and hold and then drag left or right to go to previous or next, respectively. Drag up and you’re taken to the inbox. Very fast and easy to use.

Mark as Read Button
Tired of fumbling for the “mark as read” item in the dropdown menu? Yeah, me too. This nifty features gives you an easy-to-access button along with the others at the top so you can quickly mark your messages as read.

There are a total of 25 enhancements. Others that I haven’t tried, but show promise are: forgotten attachment detector, quote selected text, hide unread counts, and signature tweaks.

Check them out and let me know what you think.