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The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Chad Parry, Gmail Engineer

Gmail users can be a passionate bunch. Many of us have, at one time or another, encouraged or cajoled friends and family to join us @gmail.com. But switching email accounts can be pretty painful. It’s like getting out of a relationship. You have so much baggage — years of emails and contacts, memories of past Christmases and Valentine’s Days — so the easier your new email account can make it, the better. My wife flirted with the idea for two years before she finally took the plunge with Gmail. The reason she finally made the switch might also convince your friends that it’s a good time to adopt a shiny new Gmail address.

Gmail now migrates email and contacts from other email providers, including Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL, and many more. It’s much easier to make the transition now that you can bring along all your old email and contacts. You can even have your messages forwarded from your old account for 30 days, giving you time to take Gmail for a test drive while you make up your mind.

This new feature is available in all newly-created Gmail accounts, and it is slowly being rolled out to all existing accounts. It’ll take longer than the few hours or days that most Gmail features take to get out to everyone. You’ll know it’s on for your account when you see the Accounts and Import tab (formerly just called Accounts) under Settings. Sorry, businesses and schools using Google Apps won’t see these new migration options.

Everyone can still use POP3 mail fetching and upload your contacts in a CSV file, but this new way is much simpler for basic imports. And we like it when you can access and move your data the way you want — it’s been easy to auto-forward all your Gmail messages to any other service, and now it’s a little easier to go the other direction too.

Go here to read the rest:
Import your mail and contacts from other accounts

Official Gmail News

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Garry Boyer, Software Engineer

Ever since we launched Google Calendar, people in our forum have been pretty vocal about a missing piece — an integrated task list. “To-do would be tooo-rific,” “I really, really, really need to use a to-do list,” and my favorite: “I’ll join your team to help you get it done!” The rumble turned into a roar a few months ago when we launched Tasks in Gmail Labs. Now we’ve integrated Tasks into Google Calendar as well.

To get started, open Calendar and click on the “Tasks” link on the left hand side. You’ll see the familiar task list you’re used to using in Gmail, with some Calendar-specific additions:

• Tasks that have due dates will automatically appear on your calendar. To create a task with a due date in Calendar, click on an empty space in month view or the all-day section of week view, and be sure select the “Task” option.



• To attach a due date to an existing task, click the right-arrow from within the task list, and then click on the calendar icon.
• You can modify a task’s due date by dragging it to a different date, just as you would with a regular calendar event.
• To mark a task completed from within Calendar, just click on the task’s checkbox. (Isn’t that satisfying, overachievers?)
• To keep track of due dates before they arrive, there’s a nifty new “Sort by due date” feature available in the Actions menu at the bottom of your task list. While sorting by due date, you can reschedule a task by clicking on it in your list, then pressing control and the up or down arrow key.

While working to help bring this feature to you, I used it to keep track of my own tasks. Now I can finally check off the last one in that list: “write blog post.” Phew.

Read the rest here: 
Tasks, now in Calendar too

Official Gmail News

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Peter Chane, Product Manager

We recently announced that Google profile results now appear at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. Creating a profile gives you greater control over what people find when they search for your name on Google. Your profile can include online photos, links to your blog or other online profiles, and ways for people to contact you — and you can restrict contact information like your address and phone number to only the people and groups you choose.

When creating a profile, you have the option to use your Gmail username as a your profile URL (profiles.google.com/yourusername), so it’s easier to remember and share. Some examples:
http://profiles.google.com/mattcutts
http://profiles.google.com/felicia.day

If you want people to be able to contact you, but don’t want to reveal your email address to the world, you can hide your username and use a 24 digit number instead. Turn on the ‘Send a message’ feature, and anyone with a Google Account can send you a message through your profile, without having your email address revealed to them.

Don’t have a profile? Go to www.google.com/profiles to get started.

Excerpt from: 
Create your Google Profile

Official Gmail News

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Adam de Boor, Software Engineer

I used to have a problem. People would ask me questions, over chat or email, and I’d have to leave Gmail to search Google for an answer. Then I’d have to select the answer, copy it, go back to Gmail and paste the answer into the chat window or my reply. Sometimes I’d get distracted and forget to go back to Gmail, and I’d have to go through it all again when I remembered what I’d been doing.

With the new Google Search experiment in Gmail Labs, my problem is solved. When you turn this feature on from the Labs tab under Settings, you’ll see a new search box on the left side of your inbox, like this:

Type your search in, and a window (like a chat window, but a bit bigger) appears at the bottom of your screen with the first few search results.

You can click on a search result and it’ll open up in another window (or another tab) so you can make sure it’s what you’re looking for. Once you’re sure it’s a result you need, moving your mouse over the result back in Gmail reveals a pull-down menu that lets you do stuff with the search result.

What’s in the menu depends on what you’re doing in Gmail:

• If you’re reading a message, you can start a reply to the message with the search result as the first thing in your reply.
• If you’re writing a message, you can paste the result, or just the URL into your message.
• If you’re chatting with someone, you can send the result via chat.
• You can also always compose a new message to send the search result.

If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, typing g and then / will take you to the search box when you’re not composing, and Ctrl + g will do it when you’re composing (that’s ⌘ + g for Mac users).

Like all things in Gmail Labs, we’re going to be tinkering with it, so let us know what you think.

Oh, and one other thing: with all the stuff we’ve been adding to Gmail Labs lately, the left side of your account might be getting crowded. A lot of the people who’ve been playing with this new feature have found it useful to turn on “Navbar drag and drop” in Labs so they can move the web search box up to the top where it’s easy to get to.

Go here to read the rest:
New in Labs: Google Search right in Gmail

Official Gmail News

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Darren Lewis, Software Engineer

For a short period of time after launching emoticons for mail, we believed we had successfully captured the entirety of human expression in 19 faces (we’re still debating whether the robot face counts), important representatives of the animal kingdom such as and , emoticons for both love () and heartbreak (), and, well, a pile of .

But soon a growing feeling of dread overcame the group . How could we have included a but not a cat? What if I want wine rather than ?

And thus was born a new Labs feature: extra emoji, the colorfully animated brainchild of our team in Japan. Simply go to the Labs tab under Settings, enable “Extra Emoji,” and have that glass of you’ve been dreaming about. Ask your in-laws about the fluffiness factor of their pet . Become a meteorologist and start predicting . Dance like you mean it . Then let us know what you think.

(If you’re wondering how we had time to create another couple hundred emoticons when we’re busy doing important stuff like rewriting Gmail for mobile and making Gmail work offline, the answer is: we didn’t. All of these extra emoticons are straight from the secret underground labs of some of the top Japanese mobile carriers, used with permission. Thanks guys!)

Read the rest here:
New in Labs: Extra emoticons

Official Gmail News

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Marc Miller, Software Engineer

A few months ago, we added fast online viewing of PDFs in your browser. As of today, that same viewer now supports TIFF and Microsoft PowerPoint document formats too: you can now view TIFF and PPT files online, directly in your browser, without having to save the files to your computer and without needing to buy, install, or wait for any special software to start up.

We’ve had a “View as slideshow” option for PowerPoint files for a while; now we’ve integrated this conversion technology into the same viewer that we use for PDFs and TIFFs.

This viewer provides a richer set of features than the old “View as slideshow” version: you can zoom in and out, select text to copy and paste, and “print” the presentation to a PDF document. And, unlike the old version, we no longer require you to have a Flash plugin installed on your browser.

I don’t know about you, but the TIFF files I receive are almost always multiple-page faxes — and the default TIFF viewer on my computer only shows me the first page. It’s quite frustrating. On the other hand, our online viewer, powered by Google Docs, will show you every page and give you the option to “print” the TIFF by opening it as a ready-to-print PDF.

Read the rest here:
PowerPoint and TIFF file viewing

Official Gmail News

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Ari Leichtberg, Software Engineer

Have you ever realized you mistakenly left someone important out of an email, or just spent too much time trying to decide who from your long list of contacts to include? Well, some of us on the Gmail team feel your pain, so we wrote a new Gmail Labs feature called “Suggest more recipients.”

Once you’ve enabled it from the Labs tab under Settings, you’ll see suggested recipients while composing messages. Gmail will suggest people you might want to include based on the groups of people you email most often. So if you always email your mom, dad, and sister together, and you start composing a message to your mom and dad, Gmail will suggest adding your sister. Enter at least two recipients and any suggestions will show up like this:

Click on a suggested name, and they’ll get added to your email.

Hopefully having lots of friends and co-workers just got a bit less onerous for you. (Oh, the burden of popularity!) Enjoy, and as usual, please let us know what you think.

See the original post here:
New in Labs: Suggest more recipients

Official Gmail News

The following is is a posting from the Official Gmail News Blog:

Posted by Kent Tamura, Software Engineer

Well, it’s about time. You no longer have to use workarounds to put images into your messages or attach images when you really want to inline them. Just turn on “Inserting images” from the Labs tab under Settings, and you’ll see a new toolbar icon like this:

Make sure you’re in rich formatting mode, or it won’t show up. Click the little image icon, and you can insert images in two ways: by uploading image files from your computer or providing image URLs.

Keep in mind that Gmail doesn’t show URL-based images in messages by default to protect you from spammers, so if you’re sending mail to other Gmail users, they’ll still have to click “Display images below” or “Always display images from …” to see images you embed.

Got feedback on inserting images? Send it our way.

Excerpt from:
New in Labs: Inserting images

Official Gmail News