Official Gmail Blog
News, tips and tricks from Google's Gmail team and friends.
A new look for the Gmail app on iPad
November 14, 2013
Posted by Carmen Wilkinson, Software Engineer
Tablets are great because the large screen not only gives you a more immersive experience but also extra room for serious multitasking. And with today’s update to the
Gmail iOS app
, you’ll be able to do even more with your iPad.
If you hold your iPad in landscape mode, you’ll immediately notice the new left hand navigation bar, which allows you to quickly switch between
inbox
categories, or between multiple accounts, with a single tap. To help you get through your email faster, you’ll also see a new message counter for each category.
For those preferring a more focused immersive experience, hold your iPad in portrait mode to get a full screen view of individual messages.
In addition to improvements to scrolling performance, there’ll also be extra room to compose your messages in full screen.
Lastly you’ll notice several iOS 7 visual updates on both iPad and iPhone. You can download the app right now from the
App Store
.
Attachments in Gmail, now with the power of Google Drive
November 12, 2013
Posted by Scott Johnston, Director of Product Management
Cross-posted on the
Official Google Blog
and
Google Drive Blog
You're probably used to downloading email attachments, but each of those files takes time to download, eats up space on your device, and can get buried deep inside your "Downloads" folder. With today's update to Gmail, you can skip that whole process. Instead, you can view attachments
and
save files directly to Google Drive without ever leaving Gmail, making it easy to access them later from whatever device you’re on—computer, phone or tablet.
The next time you open an email with attachments, you’ll see new previews of the files at the bottom of the email, from photos and videos to spreadsheets and PDFs.
When you click on one of those previews, a full-screen view of the image or document will appear. You can read, search for a particular phrase, and even browse through multiple attachments right in Gmail.
You can now also save your attachments directly to Drive simply by clicking the Drive button that appears when you hover over the preview. Of course, if you prefer to download the attachment to your computer, you can—just click the arrow button.
This new attachment experience is available on desktop and will be rolling out over the next week. If you’re one of the more than 120 million active Drive users, you know that saving your files to Drive lets you get to them from any computer, phone or tablet. And if you aren’t taking advantage of Drive just yet, give it a try with your next Gmail attachment.
Take even more actions right from your inbox
November 11, 2013
Posted by Claudio Cherubino, Developer Programs Engineer
From holiday shopping and booking flights home to dinners out with friends and family, life gets busy this time of year. The last thing you need to spend your time doing is digging through an email for relevant information, such as links for tracking packages or flight check-ins. Gmail’s
quick action buttons
help you stay on top of your busy schedule by surfacing important information as “buttons” that appear in your inbox, and now, you’ll see even more buttons to get you through this action-packed season.
For example, you can rate and review restaurants you ordered from on Seamless and even modify OpenTable reservations—all without opening an email. And for the deal lovers out there, you can conveniently save a promotion from Google Offers with one click, making it easy to find and buy it when you’re ready.
If you’re an avid uploader of YouTube and Vimeo videos, you can view finished uploads with a single click with the new “View video” button. Similarly, you can also speedily open a Dropbox folder or
Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides
that have been shared with you.
The list
goes on
, and we’re continuing to add even more buttons to make it easier for you to get things done in Gmail. If you’re a developer looking to add this feature to emails you send, check out
our Developers site
to learn more.
Handwriting input comes to Gmail and Google Docs
October 22, 2013
Posted by Xiangye Xiao, Product Manager
Cross-posted on the
Google Drive blog
Gmail and Docs offer wide language support, however in some cases using the keyboard is less than ideal. Whether you’re a student trying to include a foreign phrase in your paper or an international consultant hoping to begin your message with a friendly local greeting, now you’ll be able to use your own handwriting to input words directly into Gmail and Google Docs with your mouse or trackpad.
To try it out,
enable input tools in Gmail
or
Docs
and select the handwriting input (represented by a pencil icon) of the language you want to use.
You can write single or even multiple characters at once in the panel to see them show up in your message or document. Currently, handwriting input is available in Google Docs for over 20 languages and in Gmail for over 50 languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Russian.
Handwriting input makes the internet easier to use by people worldwide and is also part of a larger effort to break the barrier between languages, check it out in
Google Mobile Search
, Google Translate (
Web
,
Android
and
iOS
), and the
Chrome browser
.
More On Gmail’s Delivery Delays
September 24, 2013
Posted by Sabrina Farmer, Senior Site Reliability Engineering Manager for Gmail
On September 23rd, many Gmail users received an unwelcome surprise: some of their messages were arriving slowly, and some of their attachments were unavailable. We’d like to start by apologizing—we realize that our users rely on Gmail to be always available and always fast, and for several hours we didn’t deliver. We have analyzed what happened, and we’ll tell you about it below. In addition, we’re taking several steps to prevent a recurrence.
The message delivery delays were triggered by a dual network failure. This is a very rare event in which two separate, redundant network paths both stop working at the same time. The two network failures were unrelated, but in combination they reduced Gmail’s capacity to deliver messages to users, and beginning at 5:54 a.m. PST messages started piling up. Google’s automated monitoring alerted the Gmail engineering team within minutes, and they began investigating immediately. Together with the networking team, the Gmail team restored some of the network capacity that was lost and worked to repurpose additional capacity, clearing much of accumulated message backlog by 1:00 p.m. PST and the remainder by shortly before 4:00 p.m. PST.
The impact on users’ Gmail experience varied widely. Most messages were unaffected—71% of messages had no delay, and of the remaining 29%, the average delivery delay was just 2.6 seconds. However, about 1.5% of messages were delayed more than two hours. Users who attempted to download large attachments on affected messages encountered errors. Throughout the event, Gmail remained otherwise available — users could log in, read messages which had been delivered, send mail, and access other features.
What’s next? Our top priority is ensuring that Gmail users get the experience they expect: fast, highly-available email, anytime they want it. We're taking steps to ensure that there is sufficient network capacity, including backup capacity for Gmail, even in the event of a rare dual network failure. We also plan to make changes to make Gmail message delivery more resilient to a network capacity shortfall in the unlikely event that one occurs in the future. Finally, we’re updating our internal practices so that we can more quickly and effectively respond to network issues. We’ll be working on all of these improvements and more over the next few weeks—even including this event, Gmail remains well above 99.9% available, and we intend to keep it that way!
Gmail for feature phone browsers gets a new look
September 9, 2013
Posted by Ari Bezman, Product Manager
People use all sorts of devices to access Gmail: their web browser, smartphone, tablet and, in many parts of the world, their feature phone. For those of you who use a feature phone to access Gmail on the go, starting today you're getting a brand new look that's faster and easier to use.
You'll get a number of improvements that reduce the number of button presses required to read, reply and compose emails. For example, you can reply directly to a message from the thread view, you can choose to move to the previous or next conversation, and much more.
Making calls from Hangouts — in Gmail and across the web
July 9, 2013
Posted by Alex Wiesen, Senior Software Engineer
For those of you who have taken the plunge and are using desktop
Hangouts
in Gmail, Google+, and the
Chrome extension
, we've heard loud and clear that you miss the ability to make calls from Gmail, so today, we're happy to announce it's back - and better than before! Even better: calls to the US and Canada are now free from all countries where Hangouts calling is available. And international rates remain
super, super low
.
Today's launch also improves the desktop calling experience in a number of ways. For example: you can add multiple phone numbers and video participants to the same call; and you can play sound effects (like applause or laughter) with the Google Effects app.
To make a call from Hangouts, just look for the new phone icon in Gmail, or for the new "Call a phone" menu item in Google+ and the Chrome extension. And of course: if you haven't yet tried Hangouts in Gmail, you can always click your profile photo in the chat list and select "Try the new Hangouts."
Making calls from Hangouts is rolling out over the next couple of days. As we’ve
said before
: Hangouts is designed to be the future of Google Voice, and making and receiving calls is just the beginning. So stay tuned for future updates.
New Google Groups now available to everyone
June 24, 2013
Posted by Ryan Falor, Product Manager, Google Groups
With Google Groups, you can manage a mailing list, coordinate with your social club, and find experts who share your interests. Over the last year we have been working on improving the experience and adding new features while keeping our old version running.
Today we’re retiring the old version and excited to be bringing the
new Google Groups
to everyone. If you haven’t tried Groups in a while you’ll notice improved options for managing your groups and long time users may be surprised by all the features we have added along the way.
One of the recently improved features is the ability to create an
inbox
that allows you to collaboratively share, distribute and track responsibilities with others. Imagine you and a few friends are organizing an event for your school and want a single email address to coordinate with vendors, parents, and volunteers. Members of the group can work together to manage email, assign items to each other, and mark items resolved. This can be a great feature for teams seeking a really simple way to get things done without sharing passwords or losing track.
Additionally, there are several new moderation tools to make managing your forum easier and faster. For example, you can now use
canned responses
in forums and use streamlined options to make moderating forum posts easier. And if you are on the go, you can browse and moderate your groups with our mobile website.
You can learn more about the new Google Groups in the
help center
.
A new inbox that puts you back in control
May 29, 2013
Posted by Itamar Gilad, Product Manager
We get a lot of different types of email: messages from friends, social notifications, deals and offers, confirmations and receipts, and more. All of these emails can compete for our attention and make it harder to focus on the things we need to get done. Sometimes it feels like our inboxes are controlling us, rather than the other way around.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Today, Gmail is getting a brand new inbox on desktop and mobile that puts you back in control using simple, easy organization.
On the desktop, the new inbox groups your mail into categories which appear as different tabs. You simply choose which categories you want and voilà! Your inbox is organized in a way that lets you see what’s new at a glance and decide which emails you want to read when.
You can easily customize the new inbox - select the tabs you want from all five to none, drag-and-drop to move messages between tabs, set certain senders to always appear in a particular tab and star messages so that they also appear in the Primary tab.
In the
Gmail for Android 4.0
+ and
Gmail for iPhone and iPad
apps, you'll see your Primary mail when you open the app and you can easily navigate to the other tabs.
If the new inbox isn't quite your style, you can simply switch off all optional tabs to go back to classic view, or switch to any of your
other favorite inbox types
.
The new inbox is rolling out gradually. The desktop, Android and iOS versions will become available within the next few weeks. If you'd like to try out the new inbox on Desktop sooner, keep an eye on the gear menu and select
Configure inbox
when it appears in the Settings options.
Search emails, Google Drive, Calendar and more as you type
May 23, 2013
Posted by Balazs Racz, Software Engineer
As part of field trial we opened in
October
, it became possible to instantly see your relevant emails, Google Drive files, Calendar events, and more when you search in Gmail. Those of you who participated in the field trial told us that you like the time-saving convenience of searching for all your stuff from one place, and over the coming week, we'll be rolling out this feature in English to all U.S. users. Now you can find what you're looking for faster right in Gmail.
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