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

Posted by Ian Whitfield, Software Engineering Intern

People keep track of lots of things in their Google Calendars — meetings, business trips, due dates and conference calls. But when I started my summer internship at Google, I wondered why it wasn’t easier to add calendar events for the fun stuff in life, like birthdays and sports schedules.

Now, when you look under “Other Calendars,” click “Add,” then “Browse Interesting Calendars,” you’ll find calendars for hundreds of teams in dozens of sports leagues — everything from the National Football League to the Korean FA Cup.

When you subscribe to your favorite team’s calendar, you’ll see every game listed, updated in real time with the score as the game progresses.

You can also subscribe to a “Contacts’ Birthdays and Events” calendar, which will add all of your contacts’ birthdays to Google Calendar. Data is pulled from your Gmail contacts and your friends’ Google profiles.

Finally, we also have two new Calendar Labs features for you to check out: “Dim future repeating events” makes recurring meetings more transparent over time, helping more important meetings pop out, and “Add any gadget by URL” gives you the flexibility put any gadget you’d like in your calendar.

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New in Calendar: Sports schedules and contacts’ birthdays

Gmail Tips, Official Gmail News, Site

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

Posted by Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager

Have you ever clicked the “Reader” link at the top of your Gmail inbox and ended up in Google Reader, kind of unsure about what to do next?

We realize this happens from time to time, so to help people get started with Reader, we asked a bunch of prominent journalists, techies, fashion critics, and foodies for their lists of favorite sites and blogs. We compiled their reading lists and made them accessible to everyone at google.com/powerreaders, where you can explore and subscribe to lists from Thomas Friedman, Arianna Huffington, Paul Krugman, the editors of Lifehacker, Boing Boing, Kottke.org, and many more.

Whether you’re new to Google Reader or already have an extensive reading list, we hope this will be a good place to find great stuff to read. And if you want to create your own reading list to share with others, you can do that too.

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Find great stuff to read in Google Reader

Official Gmail News, Site

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

Posted by Benjamin Grol, Product Manager

When composing messages, you probably rely pretty heavily on auto-complete to add recipients. Auto-complete is convenient and fast, and usually does the trick. But sometimes seeing your list of contacts can help you remember all the people you want to include on your email. So, we’ve added a contact chooser to Gmail. Click the “To:” link (or Cc:/Bcc:) when composing a message and you’ll see something like this:

You can click on the contacts you want to add or search for others.

If you use contact groups, your groups will appear in a drop-down menu in the contact chooser, so you can select contacts from the groups you’ve already created. And if you happen to use Gmail in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, being able to pick from your list of contacts should be particularly useful since auto-complete doesn’t offer the same search as you type experience that it does in other languages.

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Composing a message? Try the contact chooser

Gmail Tips, Official Gmail News, Site

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

Posted by Grace Kwak, Product Manager

Today, we’re happy to announce three new features in Calendar Labs. To try them out, just go to the Labs tab under Calendar Settings.

1. Event flair by Dave Marmaros
Want a little airplane icon next to information about your upcoming flight? Or stars next to meetings with your boss? This experiment lets you choose from forty different icons and add one to each Calendar event. Even better, if you invite people to your events, they’ll be able to see the icon you added too. After you enable this feature, click on an event and look for the “Event flair” gadget to activate.

2. Gentle reminders by Sorin Mocanu
If you keep Google Calendar open all day long, you probably end up seeing quite a few reminders every day. Browser alerts are okay, but I tried to find a way for Calendar notifications to integrate smoothly with everything else.

Turn on “Gentle Reminders,” and when you get a notification, the title of your Calendar window or tab will start blinking and the event details will stay in Calendar.

If you’re using this lab in a supported browser (currently Google Chrome for Windows and Google Chrome beta for Linux), you’ll also have the option to get your reminders in the next generation of floating desktop notifications:

After you enable this feature, you can configure notification options on the Settings page.

3. Automatically declining events by Lucia Fedorova and Miguel García
Have you ever checked your calendar and noticed that someone scheduled a really important meeting during your vacation or at a time when you’re not available? Now there’s a way to automatically decline events when you’re not around. Turn on “Automatically declining events,” block off times when you’re unavailable, and event invitations during this period will get automatically declined.

The rest is here: 
3 new Calendar Labs

Official Gmail News

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

Posted by Emmanuel Pellereau, Software Engineer

My little sister recently setup her Gmail account to retrieve messages from her school address, so she can check all of her email accounts in one place. She no longer has to constantly log in to two email programs, and she likes using Gmail’s powerful interface for all her mail.

However, sometimes she knows an email has already been sent to her school address, and she just can’t wait for the next scheduled fetch to have it show up in her Gmail inbox. As any big brother would, I tried to solve this issue for her and millions of Gmail users.

Turn on “Refresh POP accounts” from the Labs tab under Settings, and the refresh link at the top of your inbox will not only update your inbox with your new Gmail messages, it will also fetch messages from any other accounts which you have set up.

Try it out, and let us know if you have any feedback.

More here:
New in Labs: Refresh POP accounts

Official Gmail News

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

Posted by Michael Davidson, Software Engineer

One of the lesser-known features of Gmail is its ability to help with multitasking. Frequently, I find that I need to find an old message while I’m composing an email. When this happens, I click on the “new window” icon to pop my compose area into its own window:

There’s only one problem — it’s been slow! Today, we’re rolling out a change that will fix this (reload your account to make sure you get this change). Now, popping out a window is much, much faster. No more “Loading…” progress bar.

There are a number of places you can pop up new windows in Gmail.

• In chat, there’s the little upward arrow in the title bar:

  

• When writing a message, hold the “Shift” key while you click on the Compose Mail, Reply, Reply All or Forward links and you’ll get a new window for your new message. (Holding the “Shift” key while typing the keyboard shortcut — in other words typing “C” “R” or “F” — has the same effect.)
• When you’re reading your mail, hold the “Shift” key while you click on a message to open the conversation in a new window. (Same holds true for the “Shift” key and the “o” or “Enter” shortcuts.)
• If you’re reading an email and want to save it for later, you can click the “New window” link in the upper-right hand corner of the conversation view:

  

Keep in mind that the popped out window does not outlive the closing of the original Gmail window, although we’re working on a way to make that better. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to make this work in Internet Explorer, so to see the speed-up, you’ll need to be using Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari, or Google Chrome.

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Fast new windows

Official Gmail News

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

Posted by Mark Knichel, Software Engineer

We launched Gmail Labs over a year and a half ago as a playground where engineers can come up with new features and let your input help decide which are good ideas and which don’t quite work out. Any engineer at Google can come up with feature, code it, and launch it quickly to tens of millions of users.

Labs started out with 13 features and quickly grew to 60, with even more on the way. We’ve received countless comments and kept an eye on our stats: some of these experimental features were adopted by millions and others trickled along with little usage. A couple have already graduated from Labs and we’ve already retired one: Tasks was the first to become a regular part of Gmail, Right-side Labels was retired when we updated the way labels work, and Offline Gmail graduated a couple months back. Today, true to the original intent of Gmail Labs, we’re graduating six more features and retiring five.

Graduating:

1. Search Autocomplete
2. Go To Label
3. Forgotten Attachment Detector
4. YouTube Previews
5. Custom Label Colors
6. Vacation Dates

Retiring:

1. Muzzle
2. Fixed Width Font
3. Email Addict
4. Location in Signature
5. Random Signature

These decisions were made based based mainly on usage, taking feature polish and your feedback into account. We’ve also tweaked some of the graduating features to improve them before making them default Gmail features. For example, we’ve combined Go To Label with Search Autocomplete, making it easier than ever for you to find what you’re looking for.

Search Autocomplete and Go To Label
Start typing in the Gmail search box (English only for now), and Gmail suggests terms that might help you find what you’re looking for — from contact names to labels and advanced search operators.

We’ve integrated Go To Label into this search box as well. If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, type “g” then “l” and instead of getting the old “Go to label” pop-up, you’ll be in the search box with the “label:” operator filled in for you. Start typing the label you want to go to, and autocomplete will take it from there. All you have to do is hit enter. If you want to send your cursor to the blank search field, the keyboard shortcut “/” will do it.

Forgotten Attachment Detector
From time to time, we all forget to attach a file and sheepishly send another email with the forgotten attachment. To help save you from that embarrassment, Gmail looks for phrases in your email that suggest you meant to attach a file and alerts you if it looks like you forgot an attachment.

YouTube Previews
If you’re like me, your friends probably often email you links to YouTube videos. Instead of having to clicking on the link and wait for a new window to load before you can watch the video, Gmail now shows YouTube previews right below the message. All you have to do is click the play button and enjoy.

Custom Label Colors
Why settle for a restrictive palette when you can choose from over 4000 possible color combinations to help distinguish and organize your labels? Just click on “Add custom color” from the regular labels interface.

Vacation Dates
If you specify which dates you’ll be away in advance, you won’t have to remember to turn on the vacation responder when when you’re actually on vacation. Set your dates in advance, and let Gmail do the rest.

Retiring features is always a tough decision — we invest in building and maintaining them and we realize some of you are probably fans of some of Gmail’s lesser-used features. But Labs are experimental features, and from time to time they may break (that’s why there’s a quick way to disable them), or even disappear. Over the next few days, you’ll see Muzzle, Fixed Width Font, Email Addict, Location in Signature, and Random Signature stop working and disappear from the Labs tab.

We’ll keep working on new Labs to help make your Gmail experience even better, and we’ll continue to graduate successful features and retire the ones that don’t work out to make room for new ones. Thank you to all the engineers who have worked on Labs features — especially Bruce, Darick, Jon (the intern), Ibrahim, Chris, Keith, Chad, Michael, and Marco! Please continue to send us feedback and remember that you vote for your favorite Labs features by using them and leaving comments.

More here:
Gmail Labs graduation and retirement

Official Gmail News

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

Posted by John Costigan, Software Engineer

Now that people have been playing with Google Buzz in Gmail for a week and we’ve rolled out the improvements we announced here over the weekend, we wanted to let you know about some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Buzz. Here are five tips to get you started:

1. Format your posts. When posting in Buzz, you can format text just as you can in Gmail chat: *bold*, _italics_, or -strikethrough- all work.

2. View a summary of your own Buzz activity at www.google.com/dashboard. The Google Dashboard provides a private, consolidated summary of the data associated with your Google account, as well as direct links to control your personal settings. As of today, Buzz has its own section on the Dashboard, so you can see how many people you’re following, how many people are following you, and information about your recent posts, comments, and likes. You can also access your Buzz settings right there on the page.

3. Use an @reply to send a post directly to someone’s inbox. If you want to make sure one of your friends sees a certain Buzz post, you can direct it to their inbox with an @reply. Type the “@” symbol followed by the first few letters of their name, and select their email address from the list. Only you’ll see their Gmail address — other people will just see their name.

4. Try keyboard shortcuts to fly through buzz. Turn on keyboard shortcuts from Settings, and use “j” or “n” to scroll down the buzz tab, “k” or “p” to go back up, “r” to comment (same shortcut as reply in Gmail), and “shift + l” to like.

5. Mute posts so they don’t get sent to your inbox. Comments on your posts and comments after your comments send buzz directly to your inbox. If you don’t want a lively conversation to keep appearing in your inbox as people reply to it, you can mute it. Click the arrow in the corner of a buzz post and select “Mute this post.”

If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, you can also mute buzz that appears in your inbox by hitting the “m” key while you’re reading it.

Check out our Help Center for more tips and answers to your common questions, and stay tuned for more here as well.

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5 Buzz tips

Official Gmail News