Gmail's New Compose Is Now Default For All Users

Google recently announced that its new compose window will become the default option for Gmail users.

The feature was first launched in October 2012. Since then, the “new compose experience,” as Google calls it, has received a few upgrades in response to user feedback.

If you want the old look back, you can switch to the old experience, but only temporarily. To do so, click Compose => At the bottom corner of the message pane, click the More menu icon next to the Discard button => Select “Temporarily switch back to old compose”.


And as always, if you're having trouble with the new compose feature or any other Gmail or tech-related problem, you can contact IT Customer Care by email, phone, or coming in to a campus location in-person. Find all the contact info here.

Gmail now explains why an email was spammed

If you use Google and its assorted products every day, and you are the least bit like us here at Geek.com, you relish the idea of a peak behind the curtains. After letting us watch a search engine quality meeting last week Google, seems to be in a particularly generous mood. Next stop on the transparency train is Gmail, which now explains why a message was spammed.

Above you can see a few sample message from Google regarding the algorithm’s reasoning for sending something to your spam folder. None are particularly insightful, in fact they cover the basic ground for why any email would be spammed: it’s something you’ve manually picked out as spam, something the filters have previously identified as spam, something new that uses a word or phrase that is typically found in spammed messages, or it is an email (or is like an email) that the crowd has identified as spam.

Google will also spam something if it appears to be an unsafe email or a phishing scam, as seen above. It’s worth noting that of all the phishing scams I received not all were marked with this message, so Google seems to be examining a number of signals within each email and then tagging the the one that is the strongest or that was flagged first. Something might also be marked as spam if it came from an unconfirmed sender.

These are all that I’ve been able to find, but there could be others (post them if you find them).

So why give people, potentially spammers, insight into the reasons why messages are spammed? My guess would be that Google is confident in its spam filtering system and that they fully realize a false positive is much more of a problem for people than a spam message appearing in their inbox. If this is the case, then it’s in their interest to ensure that real emails can be tracked and despammed. And let’s not forget that only you have access to the messages in your spam folder and someone that was spammed for you might not be for another user. So if you are seeing false positives, this gives you a way to identify and remedy that — either by creating a filter or hitting “Not Spam” until the system learns your preferences.

Beginners guide to IMAP vs. PoP

While many of the email users of the world are perfectly happy to use their browser based client with whatever the pre-defined rules are for their configuration, it’s important to remember that you have control over how your email travels. The two big methods of email delivery — POP and IMAP — allow you to make sure your email is available the way you want it.

Before doing all sorts of investigating about the nature of POP vs. IMAP, it might not be a bad idea to consider whether or not the default configuration you encountered before finding this article offers what you need. Most modern email clients allow you to choose which delivery method you would like to use to receive your email, while services like Gmail allow you to use a web interface, as well as POP or IMAP. These two protocols exist out of necessity, and together they support a number of workflows that allow you to choose the best way to interact with email.

Using POP3

The Post Office Protocol (POP) allows you to use your Inbox, as the name suggests, like a post office. The email leaves the sender and arrives in your Inbox without being stored on a server anywhere. In its default setting, you can have email live on your PC or phone and nowhere else. There are settings that allow you to store copies of the message on your email providers server, but this is often not included in the default configuration. Once you have received an email, you have the message stored locally. You could be offline, completely disconnected from the internet, and still have access to the complete message.

The biggest downside to POP is if you don’t have the server configured to store your email. If you download all of your email locally and something happens to your computer, you’ve lost those messages forever. Because storage is cheap everywhere now, and email takes up very little space (for most people), there’s not a good reason not to store your messages on the server. If you’re using POP in a smartphone and storage is an issue, maybe if you’ve got an 8GB iPhone filled with music and games for example, then storage may become an issue. For most users, however, storage is something that we have an abundance, so storing your email locally is a great way to make sure you always have access to your email.

Using IMAP

It’s 2013, and it seems like most of us have fairly constant access to internet. Should email be treated any differently than any other form of electronic communication that we receive? Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) allows users to access email from anything, as long as you have the username and password. With IMAP, the email lives on the server and you have access to some basic information about every email in your Inbox. When you want to see and interact with the email, the email is temporarily downloaded but not really stored on the machine you are using. The biggest benefit to IMAP is the ability to quickly access your email from just about any device — as long as you have a decent internet connection you’re never more than a moment away from your entire inbox.

Unfortunately, if you’re without a fast connection or if you are somehow without internet entirely (-gasp-), you’re going to have a bad day. Most IMAP clients will grab a week or two of email headers and store that information locally, but will not grab images or attachments. If you need to search your inbox for something, and that email is more than a few weeks old, you’ll find that the headers for your email will skip entire weeks of received messages unless you’re connected to the net.

Choose wisely, but switching is easy

The POP vs. IMAP debate is all about how you interact with your email. If you’re constantly in your email with attachments and use it like file storage system, POP will guarantee that you always have access to your information. If you’re constantly connected to a broadband or LTE network and you flip back and forth between a laptop, desktop, tablet, and smartphone, IMAP would most likely be the best thing for you. In most cases, especially if you have POP configured to store your email on the server instead of deleting it, you won’t normally notice a difference between the two services.

There’s also nothing that says you have to pick one and stick with it. Even Gmail, one of the most popular free email services in the world, makes it easy to choose POP or IMAP and allows you to switch between them as you see fit. You can choose the service the best fits your needs, but ideally your email should exist as a service that requires very little maintenance and configuration once it has been setup and used.

3 Labs graduations, 1 retirement

Today we’re excited to graduate three more features from the experimental testing ground of Gmail Labs. Superstars, Nested Labels, and Advanced IMAP Controls are now first-class citizens in the Gmail world, thanks largely to your feedback. We’re also retiring the Google Search box lab which was redundant with the “Search the Web” button that’s already in Gmail.

Superstars

Superstars, one of the most popular Labs features, provides different types of stars in addition to Gmail’s basic one. You can assign a certain star to special conversations and use another as a visual reminder that you need to follow-up on a message later. You can now choose your own set of stars from Settings:

Once you’ve done that, the stars will rotate with each consecutive click on the star icon.

Nested Labels

Labels are a great way of organizing your email; nested labels give you the ability to organize labels hierarchically. Starting today, nested labels are enabled for everyone along with a couple of small improvements such as a sticky collapse/expand state and better editing options.

To start using them, you can either create a new sub-label from the dropdown menu on the left hand side or just move an existing label under another one using the edit option:

Advanced IMAP Controls

This Labs feature provided a very useful set of advanced controls for those of you who access Gmail through IMAP clients (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, or your iPhone’s native mail app). Now it’s easier to take advantage of features like syncing only selected labels or limiting the folder size limit to improve your IMAP experience. 

True to the original spirit of Gmail Labs, we’ll continue to add new features, graduate some, and retire others, so keep trying them out and sending us your feedback.

9 Gmail gadgets to try

There is a powerful but little known Gmail feature that lives in Labs called “Add any gadget by URL.” Once you turn it on, you can add iGoogle gadgets (or any gadget specified by an .xml file) to the side of your Gmail account. While most of these gadgets are built by third-parties and not owned or maintained by Google, they can be super handy. 

To install any of these gadgets, follow those steps:

1) From your Gmail account, go to the Labs tab of Gmail Settings. 

2) Look for the Lab “Add any gadget by URL.” Enable it, then click “Save changes.”

3) Go to the new “Gadgets” tab under “Settings” and add the relevant .xml address.

Here’s a list of 9 I’ve found worth trying out:

Wikipedia

Look for a specific query right from Gmail.

http://www.google.com/ig/modules/wikipedia.xml

Google Calculator

Make some quick calculations while typing an email.

http://calebegg.com/calc.xml

Note

Add a sticky note to the corner of your Gmail account.

http://www.google.com/ig/modules/sticky.xml

Remember the Milk

If you’re a fan of this task management system, accessing all your “Remember the milk” notes from right within Gmail can be super handy.

http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/modules/gmail/rtm.xml

PolyClock

Gives you the time of day for any place in the world.

http://gad.getpla.net/poly/clock.xml

Currency Converter

A real time currency converter.

http://helloworld123---.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/currency-converter.xml

bit.ly URL shortener

Lets you shorten URLs in a single click.

http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/107368512201818821991/bitly-shortener.xml

Google Calendar

Displays your Google Calendar agenda right from Gmail.

http://www.google.com/ig/modules/calendar.xml

Google Docs

Gives you quick access to your most recent documents.

www.google.com/ig/modules/docs.xml

Gmail: It’s cooler in the cloud

Cloud computing is secure, simple, keeps you productive and saves you money. But the cloud can also save energy. A recent report by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and Verdantix estimates that cloud computing has the potential to reduce global carbon emissions by millions of metric tons. And Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford who has led several studies on data center energy use, has written that for many enterprises, the cloud “is significantly more energy efficient than using in-house data centers.”

Because we’re committed to sustainability, we sharpened our pencils and looked at our own services to see how they stack up against the alternatives. 

We compared Gmail to the traditional enterprise email solutions it’s replaced for more than 4 million businesses. The results were clear: switching to Gmail can be almost 80 times more energy efficient (PDF) than running in-house email. This is because cloud-based services are typically housed in highly efficient data centers that operate at higher server utilization rates and use hardware and software that’s built specifically for the services they provide—conditions that small businesses are rarely able to create on their own. 

An illustration of inefficient server utilization by smaller companies compared to efficient utilization in the cloud.

If you’re more of a romantic than a businessperson, think of it this way: It takes more energy to send a message in a bottle than it does to use Gmail for a year, as long as you count (PDF) the energy used to make the bottle and the wine you drank.

We ran a similar calculation for YouTube and the results are even more striking: the servers needed to play one minute of YouTube consume about 0.0002 kWh of energy. To put that in perspective, it takes about eight seconds for the human body to burn off that same amount. You’d have to watch YouTube for three straight days for our servers to consume the amount of energy required to manufacture, package and ship a single DVD.

In calculating these numbers, we included the energy used by all the Google infrastructure supporting Gmail and YouTube. Of course, your own laptop or phone also consumes energy while you’re accessing Google, so it’s important to choose an efficient model. 

There’s still a lot to learn about the global impacts of cloud computing, but one thing we can say with certainty: bit for bit, email for email, and video for video, it’s more efficient in the cloud.

Search for emails by size and more in Gmail

We're always looking for ways to make it faster and easier for you to find your messages using search in Gmail. So starting today, you can now search emails by size, more flexible date options, exact match and more.

This means, for example, to find emails larger than 5MB, you can search for size:5m or larger:5m or to find emails sent over a year ago, older_than:1y. 

These changes go hand in hand with other recent enhancements to search such as the improved autocomplete predictions and a field trial for instant results from Gmail, Google Drive and more as you type.

Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

Since Google Drive launched last April, millions of people have started using Drive to keep, create and share files. Starting today, it’s even easier to share with others: you can insert files from Drive directly into an email without leaving your Gmail. 

Have you ever tried to attach a file to an email only to find out it's too large to send? Now with Drive, you can insert files up to 10GB -- 400 times larger than what you can send as a traditional attachment. Also, because you’re sending a file stored in the cloud, all your recipients will have access to the same, most-up-to-date version. 

Like a smart assistant, Gmail will also double-check that your recipients all have access to any files you’re sending. This works like Gmail’s forgotten attachment detector: whenever you send a file from Drive that isn’t shared with everyone, you’ll be prompted with the option to change the file’s sharing settings without leaving your email. It’ll even work with Drive links pasted directly into emails. 

So whether it’s photos from your recent camping trip, video footage from your brother’s wedding, or a presentation to your boss, all your stuff is easy to find and easy to share with Drive and Gmail. To get started, just click on the Drive icon while you're composing a message. Note that this feature is rolling out over the next few days and is only available with Gmail's new compose experience, so you'll need to opt-in if you haven't already.

Exploring Google Drive

Your document list is now part of Google Drive. Watch this short video to learn about syncing your stuff with the desktop application, creating and sharing files, new views and simplified navigation, and more. Find out more at:

https://drive.google.com/start/

Google Green

Who knew that switching to Google was not only a technological advancement, but an environmental one?

Google has eliminated it's impact on global climate change since 2007. Google is also the first major internet services company to gain external certification for their high environmental standards.

Check out a great video on how Google provides so much with so little environmental impact:

Introducing the New Compose in Gmail

We're always trying to make Gmail faster and easier to use, so today we're introducing a completely redesigned compose and reply experience that does just that.

Faster
How many times have you been writing an email and had to reference something in another message? Saving a draft, opening the old email, and then reopening your draft wastes valuable minutes. The new compose pops up in a window, just like chats (only larger).

This makes it easy to reference any other emails without ever having to close your draft. You can even do a search or keep an eye on new mail as it comes in. And because the compose window works the same way as chats, you can write multiple messages at once and minimize a message to finish it later. 

Easier to use
The new compose is designed to let you focus on what's important: your message. The controls are still there when you need them but get out of the way when you don’t. We’ve even added some new features like the ability to easily insert inline images and have more to come.

And, when you add recipients to your message, you'll see profile pictures of your contacts in autocomplete helping you find the right person faster. You can also drag and drop the new address chips between to:, cc: and bcc:. When you’re done adding recipients, the address area collapses automatically to get out of your way.

You’ll also see these same changes when you respond to a message. The reply experience has been designed to fit better inline as part of your conversation -- replies take up much less vertical height, intelligently expand to fit your content, and always keep the recipients and other controls in view no matter how long your message gets.

We're rolling out a preview of the new compose and reply today. After we've added some finishing touches over the coming months, we’ll enable it for everyone.

Find Your Stuff Faster in Gmail and Search

When you’re looking for something, you should be able to find what you need quickly and easily without needing to think about where it might be, whether it's in your email or out on the public web. That’s why this past August we opened a field trial allowing you to sign up to get information from Gmail right from the Google search box.

We’ve gotten very positive feedback from those of you testing it out -- such as this note: “The Gmail results feature is awesome! The fact that it's all integrated into one screen is huge.” Many testers have requested being able to find Drive files as well -- as one of you put it, “It would be awesome if I could search my google drive from google search as well :)”.

So starting today, you can sign up for a new and expanded field trial that makes it easier to find your stuff across Google, whether you’re searching on Google.com or searching in Gmail.

In Gmail, as you begin to type into the search box, you'll instantly start seeing relevant emails from Gmail as well as results from Google Drive, Google Calendar, and more:

Similarly, when you search on Google.com, your results will include relevant information and messages from Gmail (something familiar to those who joined the original field trial) and now -- new in this field trial -- also files, documents, spreadsheets and more from Google Drive: 

To give this a try, please visit the updated field trial page and select Join the field trial. Please note that this trial is only accessible in English and for @gmail.com addresses (not available on Google Apps accounts). And keep the feedback coming!

Communicate More Easily Across Languages In Gmail

Finding the right words can be difficult, especially across languages, and once you choose them, finding a way to type them can be even harder. Try emailing family in Germany, chatting with friends in China or adding a Russian business partner's name to your contacts and you may find yourself limited by the language of your keyboard.

That's why today we’re adding more than 100 virtual keyboards, transliteration and IMEs—collectively called input tools—in Gmail. These tools enable you to type in the language and keyboard layout you’re accustomed to, making it easy to keep in touch with family, friends and coworkers from any computer. You can even switch between languages with one click.

To try it out, check the box next to Enable input tools under Language in Settings.

Once you’ve enabled it, you’ll see the Input Tools icon next to the Settings button in your toolbar, and you can turn on and off any Input Tool from there. 

With these new virtual keyboards, Gmail supports typing in 75 languages—a big jump from the five languages that were initially supported when we introduced Indic transliteration in Gmail in 2009.

Gmail’s users are from all over the world—and language should never get in the way of a good conversation. If you'd like to use Input Tools in other places, try out the Chrome extension, theWindows desktop client or the Android apps.

Improved Search In Gmail

When we built Gmail, we wanted to bring that same great search experience Google is known for to email. And today, we are making that experience even better by improving the autocomplete predictions you see when you search in Gmail. 

Now when you type something into the Gmail search box, the autocomplete predictions will be tailored to the content in your email, so you can save time and get the information you want faster than ever before. For example, you might now get lax reservation or lax united as predictions after typing "lax" if you have received an email with a flight confirmation for your trip to Los Angeles in your inbox recently.

We will be rolling out improved autocomplete in English over the next few days and will follow with more languages over the next few months. While initially improved autocomplete will not be available for Google Apps customers, we plan to bring this feature to Apps domains in the future.

Find Facts And Do Research Inside Google Docs

Today we’re introducing the research pane—a new feature that brings the web’s wealth of information to you as you’re writing documents.

The research pane taps into Google Search directly from Google documents, so whether you want to add a cool destination to your itinerary for an upcoming trip to India or you're looking for the perfect presidential quote for a political science paper, you don’t even have to open a new tab.

You can access the research pane from the Tools menu by right clicking on a selected word that you want to learn more about, or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+R on Windows or Cmd+Alt+R on Mac. From the research pane, you can search for whatever info you need to help you write your document. With just a couple clicks you can look up maps, quotes, images, and much more.

If you find something you like, you can add it by clicking the insert button or, for images, by dragging them directly into your document. If appropriate we’ll automatically add a footnote citation so there’s a record of where you found the info.

Hopefully bringing knowledge from the web to Google documents will make your writing process just a little bit more efficient.

An Email's Journey

If you’re anything like me, you send and receive a lot of emails every day. But have you ever wondered where your message goes after you hit “send?” How does an email travel from your computer to your friend’s smartphone across the country or around the world? 

We’re answering those questions with Story of Send, a new site that gives you a behind-the-scenes look into how all that virtual information makes its journey through the real world—from your Internet service provider to our data centers and beyond. Along the way, you’ll discover everything from where we filter for spam and scan for viruses to how we’re minimizing our impacton the environment through energy efficiency and renewable power. 

We’ve included videos and photos throughout the journey so you can explore certain areas more deeply. For example, if you’re curious what data center servers look like, we’ve included some photos. Or you can watch a video to learn about how we purchase clean energy from wind farms near our data centers. And because technology doesn’t always have to be serious, you might find a vampire or two lurking around or uncover other surprises on the journey. 

In the past, Gmail fans have shown us how emails connect people across the world. Now we’re providing a glimpse into how those emails go from one place to another. So hit send and start the journey today. 

Why Google?

See what's its like to go full Google:

Google Drive

Keep Everything. Share Anything.

Going Google With Gmail

If you are a frequent visitor to the Gmail blog, there’s a good chance you’re already a Gmail ninja. Maybe you use video chat in Gmail to keep in touch with family when you’re on the road. Perhaps you’ve created a superb organizational system with labels and Priority Inbox and even have a colorful theme to say “this inbox is mine.”

Sound familiar? If so, then you’ve seen the benefits of going Google. But we all know someone who hasn’t yet made the switch, and is missing out on the convenience of having email, chat, video, and calling all together in one place.

So, as part of our effort to let users know all the things they can do by going Google, we’ve put together a short video that shows just how easy it is to get things done with Gmail when you are living in the cloud. Take a look and then share it with one of your friends. They might just be the next person to go Google - and they’ll have you to thank!