Google is also famous for their developer friendly culture and one of the offshoots of that is the 20% time that the developers are allowed to work on side projects that aren’t directly related to their products. Some of those features make it to the public and the Gmail Labs is an example of that. These are experimental features that the Gmail team doesn’t consider ready for prime time yet but they still release it for their users to use and benefit from them, at their own risk. None of these features will harm you or gobble up your email but they’re just not as polished at Google would want them to be.

To enable the Labs features, you need to log-in to your Gmail account, click on the Settings link and select the Labs tab. Select the Add-ons that you want by checking the “Enable/Disable” radio button and click the Save Changes button.

With all that theory behind us, let’s dive into some of the Add-ons that I recommend.

1. Right Side Chat

This add-on puts the Gmail chat box on the right of your inbox and is an absolutely must have for anyone who wants to use their on screen real estate efficiently. Another bonus is that you no longer see the advertisements on the right when you’re reading an email.

2. Advanced IMAP controls

If you use IMAP to access your Gmail account, do yourself a favor and enable this extension. This lets you select labels that you want to see via IMAP, Turn off messaging expunging and trash messages as soon as they’re deleted from IMAP. Very useful extension, if you ask me.

3. Canned Responses

If you’re one of those people who like to reply to emails in terse one liners or if you’re Steve Jobs, enable this extension. You get the ability to save your own Canned Responses and use them when replying to/composing an email instead of typing out the same thing everytime. Real timesaver.

4. Create a document

Have you ever felt the need to add some information from an email to a document that you need to make? Do you do this often ? If the answer to both the questions is yes, I’d suggest that you enable this extension that lets you create a Google Docs document straight from your email.

5. Custom Keyboard shortcuts

Gmail already supports a large number of keyboard shortcuts and for the Unix nerds among us, those shortcuts just make sense. If you’re not a Unix or Emacs guy and really wished that you could somehow remap the shortcut keys, use this add-on that lets you do exactly that.

6. Default ‘Reply to All’

This is for all those corporate types who love to mark a hundred people on an email and then always use ‘Reply to All’ on every email. This add-on makes ‘Reply to All’ as the default option for replying to emails. Isn’t this fun ?

7. Multiple Inboxes

I’ll admit first hand that this is one extension that I haven’t tried myself because of the simple reason that I don’t need it, yet. But, if you are someone who deals with hundreds of emails everyday and would like to have quick access to emails from multiple labels, then you should use it. You can also have a search term as one of your inboxes. Very useful extension for the email ninjas among.

8. Quote selected text

This is an extension that I personally find very useful. I reply to a lot of emails everyday and, often, I have to quote a part of an email when replying. Using this extension I just select the part of the email that I want to quote in the reply and hit the reply button. Voila ! Only the part that I selected will be quoted.

9. Google calendar gadget

If you use Google Calendar, chances are that you live your life by it. Most of us anyway swear by email, so why not combine the two ? Enable this extension to display your Google Calendar alongside your email.

So, these were some of my favorite Labs features. Do you use any of these features ? Which ones are your favorite?

Previously we have discussed how to access Gmail on your desktop and some Gmail search tips to effectively manage your email overload. This tutorial describes how you can use Multiple inboxes- a Gmail labs feature, that lets you check all your email’s at one place. You may have 5 or 6 email accounts but you can check all the incoming mails from your primary  email account at Gmail.

Following are the steps involved to link all your Gmail accounts and check email at one place:

1. Open your primary email account in Gmail. You would like to receive emails from all your other Gmail accounts here. Go to Gmail labs by clicking the green icon next to settings.

2. In the labs page that opens, scroll down until you find “Multiple inboxes” in the left pane. Select the radio button “Enabled” and hit “Save changes”.

3. Now sign out of your primary email account and login to your other email accounts one by one (let’s call it secondary email accounts). You will forward a copy of all incoming emails from these secondary email accounts to your primary email account. You would read the emails in primary email and even reply to messages from the primary email account only.

4. To enable forwarding of incoming emails, just login to your secondary email account. Go to Settings and select the “Forwarding and Pop/IMAP“ tab. After that select the radio button that says “Forward a copy of the incoming mail to” and put the email address of your primary account there.

5. Repeat the same step for all your secondary email account’s. Also do not forget to archive the email’s copy in the respective accounts. This way, you can always access them later and they do not get lost.

6. After you have configured all your email accounts to send a copy of the incoming mail, log in to your primary email account again.

7. Go to Settings and enable IMAP. You will find the IMAP settings under “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab.

8. Switch to the “Multiple inboxes” tab in the same page. Put all your secondary email addresses in the search query panes and give each pane a suitable title. Let us assume that your secondary email addresses are: harry@gmail.com, robert@gmail.com, mary@gmail.com, santa@gmail.com. Put all these email addresses in the search query pane as shown below

9. In the next pane choose how many conversation you would want to see listed in each of the mail accounts you added above. While you can use any number but it is advisable to keep it under 5.

10. We are almost done. Choose the position where you want to show the different inboxes. I prefer keeping the inboxes in the right so that i can keep an eye on the incoming messages without having to scroll down.

Here is how the email inbox looks after activating multiple inboxes in Gmail:

There you go. From now on, you will now get all the emails in your primary email account. Here is a wonderful screen cast that describes the above tutorial:

Let me know whether you were able to activate the multiple inbox feature in Gmail or not. Also check out some useful Gmail labs features to increase your email productivity.

Many are in their Labs stage of development. A lot of the sites you have grown to love have been in Google Labs at some point. Google Maps, Reader, Docs and Alerts are just a few. Here are a few cool sites you may not be aware Google has in the lab.

Trends

Trends is a very handy research and comparison tool. Typing something like [VW, Ford, Fiat] into the search bar results in graphs, location of searches and related news displayed. By comparing multiple search terms simultaneously, time is saved importing the data into spreadsheets or a graph. All of the information is right at your finger tips.

I have also used Trends when quickly comparing keywords (although much better tools are available) to get a general idea for the popularity of the search term.

Specialized Search

To help narrow your search, Google offers specialized search engines for different topics. An example might be if you are looking for Linux how-to information. You could go to the Linux search and type in your search term there. This will filter out all of the Windows server information, in-turn cutting down on the amount of sites you might have to look through.

The current specialized searches are: Mac, Windows, Linux, BSD, US Government and University Search lets you to search to a specific school website for things like enrollment info or course schedules.

News Timeline

Search a date in the past to find out what happened. The advanced search allows different criteria to be set up such as a specific newspaper, magazine, blog or baseball scores.

While using Google News Timeline, I did come across some issues. One problem is the magazine or newspaper must have a digital version available in Google’s Book Search or the News Archive. This may be a little bit of a snag if you are trying to do an in depth search for something.

Google Moderator

Moderator is a really simple idea. Create a “series” and invite general public to ask questions, give tips, make suggestions or just about any thing else you can think of. It is kind of a mashup of a forum and crowd-sourcing. Your audience will ask questions, then the same people will vote on the question letting you know how many people agree or disagree with what was asked. With some creativity, this could be a great proving ground for products, ideas or services.

Fast Flip

A quick way to scan through different news sources at the same time. The news feeds can be narrowed by a topic, source, most viewed and several other options. Fast Flip shows a small screenshot of the page usually just big enough to see the major headlines. When you spot something, just click on it to make the page large enough to read. If you could customize the sites and save your choices, it would be pretty cool RSS reader.

City Tours

Offers a variety of attractions mapped out using Google Maps. Directions, approximate time to see the attraction, walking times to the next destination, ratings and hours of operation. It pretty much takes the guess work out of planning a touristy trip.

What kind of app or site would you like to see Google make next?

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.

1. Send and Archive

This add on is great if, for example, you send a group email. Even if you have the original message in a folder and labeled, replies will often show up in your inbox. Instead of clicking on the send button when you send a follow up reply, click the Send and Archive button. Doing this will remove the message thread from your inbox making it viewable in the labeled folder.

2. Mark as Read Button

You would think this is a feature that was built in from the start, but it wasn’t. Having this button will let you batch mark all of the selected emails as read. Big time saver if you don’t want to open them all individually.

3. Hide Unread Counts

I don’t use this one anymore because I worked out a good system for automating most of my incoming emails. This feature, however, is a good one for people who leave everything in their inbox, yet hate knowing how many unread messages you are ignoring.

4. Canned Responses

Think of canned responses like a vacation or out of office reply. You can have this pre-thought out reply sent to anyone with selected keyword, email address, in response to an ad you posted or in reply to the contact form on your site. When setting up your filter(s), one of the actions you can select is to send a canned response.

5. Mail Goggles

If you are have poor math skills when you are not tired or haven’t been drinking, this add-on should probably be avoided. Here is how Mail Goggles works. If you try to send an email during a user specified time period, say 10 PM to 4 AM, you will be asked to do a 3 simple math problems. This may seem simple enough. If you get the problems wrong, the email is saved to your Drafts folder instead.

When basic addition and subtraction seem like quantum physics, it may be a good indicator you need to catch a couple hours sleep. Odds are your seemingly well crafted email, is probably not quite ready to be sent.

6. Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat

Sending a quick SMS is a nice little addition to the mini chat gadget in your Gmail navigation bar. When you hover over the contact you wish to SMS, a pop up box appears. In the “More” drop down is an option to send an SMS. If the person signs into to Gtalk, you have an option to toggle to chat. This keeps the previous conversation in the same window.

The SMS feature is currently for USA phones only.

7. Navbar Drag and Drop

Drag all of the widgets in the left sidebar to the order that makes sense to you.

8. Undo Send

How many times have you wanted to unsend an email because you forgot to add a file. Maybe you said something you instantly regret saying. This little gem gives you the chance you to unsend the email for up to 10 seconds after you sent it. You CAN actually take your words back.

9. Offline

If you activate this add-on, Gmail will place an optional shortcut icon on your Desktop. Each time you open up Gmail while you have an active internet connection, Offline will sync your email to your computer. You will have access to the majority of the features you need like composing, reading, searching, moving things into folder, etc.  You obviously can’t send or receive new emails if you do not have a network connection. When you reconnect, all of your changes are synced and composed emails are sent.

10. Filter Import/Export

Exporting all of the filters you have worked hard to create is just plain smart. Imagine having to redo all of them over again, one by one. I have about 40 filters so this is a huge time saver if anything were to happen. After you export the XML file, you can email it to yourself for safe keeping.

For those of you who aren’t using any of the additional 50+ add-on features Gmail has to offer… shame on you! Don’t you know there are needy people using Hotmail that would love to have what you have?

How have you personalized your Gmail inbox?