Like many of you, I’ve been happily using GMail for years. While there are many things I like about it, one in particular has always impressed me: email search. It’s no surprise that Google would add powerful search features to their email system, but there are many great features that go laregely unnoticed by many GMail users. Today we’ll go over some of GMail’s best search tricks and how to get the most out of this powerful feature.

We here at MakeTechEasier got a lot of positive feedback on our coverage of Google Wave, along with quite a few requests for additional information. So here, by reader request, is the second installment of Wave. Today we’ll be covering some of the more advanced and detailed features that didn’t fit into the original post. In this installment we’ll take a look at Wave’s use of folders, contacts, extensions, and believe it or not, even scroll bars.

Few days ago, Google announced that they have released the push notification support for Gmail for mobile devices such as iPhone and Windows Mobile. Today, let us show you how you can set up a push Gmail account on your iPhone.

By following this tutorial, you can also configure it to sync your contact and calendar.

Before you start, please note that Google sync only work with iPhone firmware 3.0 and above.

For quite a while, Google has been releasing add-on features for a good number of their web applications. Gmail, Calendar and Reader all have several user selectable features. Links to these experimental add-ons can be found on the Google Labs page. Not all of the add-ons are perfect, but they are kid tested and mother approved.

Here is a quote about the Labs add-ons from the top of the Gmail Labs page:

“Gmail Labs is a testing ground for experimental features that aren’t quite ready for primetime. They may change,break or disappear at any time.

If (when) a Labs feature breaks, and you’re having trouble loading your inbox, there’s an escape hatch. Use http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0.”

I apparently have nothing better to do with my time than add fancy features to my Gmail. I’ll go ahead and save you the time of figuring out which of the Gmail Labs add-ons you should head for and give you the top 10 to get you started.

A while ago I was perusing the Google help files and found a cool little tidbit. It didn’t really hit me right away how useful it could be. Once I started to use it, I wondered how I got by not having it before. What I am babbling on about is Gmail’s ability to handle aliases. These are variations of your email address, not totally different email addresses, going to a common inbox.

The main idea behind using aliases in Gmail is to help you automate organizing incoming emails. Most people I know have separate folders for different people or projects. When an email is received, it eventually gets manually moved to the folder in which it belongs. Some who use desktop programs like Mail or Outlook may have rules set up. Few people however, take the time for this with their web based email accounts. This is one of the reasons people spend so much time dealing with email everyday.

Ubuntu 9.04 is the latest major release of Ubuntu. Among it’s many improvements, it brings with it a very cool new notification system to notify the user of events happening on the system using a nice transparent popup window in one corner of the screen.

The notification system has been designed to be non intrusive and as such, does not require user intervention at all. All notifications are on the screen for a pre-defined period of time and after that just disappear without the user having to do anything.

The Ubuntu team has done a very good job of modifying the various system applications to use the new framework but until now I haven’t seen any email notification application using this framework.

The non-intrusive nature of the notifications makes it a natural choice to be used as an email notification method and the first utility to be made for the task is the awesome Gmail Notifier called gm-notify.

XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) is a IM system used by all kinds of chat clients, most notably Jabber and GMail. It’s open standard, allowing anyone to create a XMPP compatible chat programs. This gives it a flexibility not found in other chat systems like AIM and MSN Messenger. People have come up with some interesting uses for XMPP, and today we’ll be covering its use as a microblogging system.

With Email service providers growing at a rapid pace, it is very common for anyone to have several email accounts. While it is easy to start an account, managing all the  accounts can become a chaotic task and at worst, it can take hell a lot of time and effort.

The question is: Is there any application that allows you to manage multiple email accounts? In desktop, Zimbra answers this question. For Web-based application that is independent of any application or platform. Zoho mail seems to be a great choice.

In this tutorial, I would like to demonstrate how you can manage multiple email accounts (in this case, Gmail, Yahoo and Live) with Zoho mail.

Gmail is one of the most preferred web mail service among many Internet users. Apart from accessing Gmail using POP client in your desktop, there are other ways that you can access your Gmail on desktop. In this tutorial, we shall discuss two other ways to access Gmail on your desktop.

It is a misconception to think that all the emails in your Gmail account are safe and will be there forever. In the events that Gmail is down, or for some reasons, you were banned by Google, you won’t be able to access all your emails and all of them will be gone forever. To prevent such incident from happening, you might want to backup your mail in your Gmail account to your system. Come to think of it, you backup your system regularly because all the data and files in your computer are important to you. If your emails are important to  you, shouldn’t you do a backup too?

Gmail-backup is an application that allows you to backup/restore your Gmail. It has an easy to use interface and few configurations are needed to get it to work. Other than backing up your emails, you can also use it to migrate your mails from one Gmail account to another.  This tutorial will teach you how to backup your Gmail account in Ubuntu Intrepid.