There are two online petitions I’ve signed in my life. One was for a “Xena: Warrior Princess” movie. The other, which I signed a few months before starting at Google, was for Gmail IMAP. As some of you know, IMAP is the best way to access your email from multiple devices (e.g. phone or desktop). It keeps the same information synced across all devices so that whatever you do in one place shows up everywhere else you might access your email.

For example, I can:

• read an email in Gmail, then
• move it to the “Starred” folder on my iPhone, then
• archive it by moving it to “All Mail” in Thunderbird, then
• see all of those changes on my Blackberry (or any of the above devices for that matter).

For the past few years, we’ve offered POP access, which is similar to IMAP but lacks one critical feature: your changes made on other devices aren’t seen in Gmail when you log back in. Instead you are presented with a list of unread mail, and you must re-read and re-sort everything. For this reason, as soon as I started at Google, IMAP was one of the first things I asked about. Since then, I’ve seen countless blog posts, requests, chats, and just about everything else asking, “Are you guys ever going to do IMAP?” Well now I can say: Yes. Yes, we are doing IMAP. In fact, we are doing it for you for free on all devices and platforms.

As we roll out the feature over the next couple of days, you will be able to use Gmail at work, in your car, or just about anywhere on any device, and actions you take will be automatically synced with Gmail on the web (and remember it works the other way too: anything you do on the Web will be seen on your phone or in your mail client). Just click the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab in your Gmail “Settings” and turn it on. (Psst. If you don’t see the “IMAP” in the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab, then check back soon. We are giving it to users as fast as we can).

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When we began rolling out a new Gmail code architecture a few weeks ago, we also launched some new features to help improve the speed and convenience of managing email. I’ve been using several of these new additions over the last few weeks, and while they might seem small on their own, they really can add up to save you a lot of time and hassle. That’s why I decided to list my five favorite new features that are so new, you may not have noticed them. We are still rolling them out to IE6, international and Google Apps users, but for those of you who noticed a new contact manager among other recent improvements in our latest version, here they are:

5. “Archive and next” shortcut
We added a bunch of new shortcuts to Gmail, but one that I’ve found to be a true time-saver is what I call the “archive and next” shortcut. When I have a lot of mail, it can be really annoying to have to open a message, click “Back to Inbox” and then select the next email I want to read. So once you enable shortcuts in Settings, you can simply press the left bracket key “[” while viewing a message to archive it, and then immediately open the next oldest one. When I see a long list of unread messages, I like to open the first one and then just hit “[” to swiftly move through my mail and archive as I go. (P.S. By clicking the right bracket “]” you can also move the other way if you want to open newer messages after you archive).

4. Share mail searches with friends
How many times do your friends tell you, “I can’t find that email you sent me.” Now you can prove that you did indeed send that message, despite the accusations. All you have to do is search for the message using your expert mail searching skills, and when you find it listed in the results, just copy and paste the URL and email it to your friend. When he or she goes to that link while in Gmail, your friend’s Gmail will run the same search you ran and will be able to locate that “lost” email instantly. For example, if you wanted to share a search for “pick me up at airport,” so flight information can be located, you would send over this URL: http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/pick+me+up+at+airport.

3. Browser navigation and history
Your web browser is now a great way to navigate Gmail. Instead of having to find the right links on the page to move from inbox to messages to other Gmail views, you can use the browser navigation buttons (back and forward) to jump back and forth between emails. You can also open your browser history and click on specific emails that you’ve read to go right back to them. This allows you to quickly access certain emails without having to re-read your inbox. Browser history is something that often doesn’t work well on complex web apps like Gmail, but we’ve gone to great lengths to make it work right.

2. Bookmark emails
I frequently need to save a single email for a period of time, such as a message that includes an important phone number. But I don’t want to create a separate label for one message, and I also don’t want to archive all the email that comes in after that message just to keep that thread near the top of my inbox–and hopefully the top of my mind. This problem is now easily solved by a new ability to bookmark specific emails. All emails now have dedicated URLs, so just by adding a browser bookmark while viewing a message, you can return to it whenever you want, just like a regular web page–although you will still have to log in to Gmail if you’ve signed out.

1. “Filter messages like this”
I find filters to be one of the most useful features in Gmail, but sometimes it can be hard to set them up quickly. So we added a new capability that makes a filter based on the message you are reading, so you can keep track of future similar emails. By clicking on the dropdown menu in the upper right-hand corner of every email (the upside-down triangle), you can now see the option to “Filter messages like this.” Not only can you easily create a filter based on the sender, but this is especially handy if you are trying to filter emails sent to mailing lists. We automatically set up a filter for you based on the “list ID” header, which does a better job of finding emails sent to mailing lists.

 

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I was pretty excited when we launched chat integration in Gmail. Finally I could chat and email in one place–but I couldn’t chat with friends using other instant messaging services.

From the beginning, Google has been committed to open standards and interoperation for instant messaging. So when our friends at AOL agreed to let Gmail users talk to users on their network, we jumped at the chance.

Today we are happy to tell you about a new feature we’ve started to roll out which will enable you to sign into your AIM account and chat with your AIM buddies right inside Gmail. When you log in to AIM through Gmail chat, your AOL buddies will appear in your chat list with friends from your Google Talk network, and you will see the yellow “running man” logo to the right of your AIM friends’ screen names. To your AIM friends it will look like you are logged in to AIM as usual.

Having more friends to chat with is always more fun and we hope you enjoy this new feature, which we are rolling out today to English Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 users.

P.S. If you own a large IM network and would like to work with us, have your people contact our people.

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Colored labels make it easier to keep track of emails, and by using them with filters, I realized they can provide an almost entirely new way of visualizing my inbox based on context rather than order. By setting up filters so emails from certain senders (or on certain topics) automatically appear with colored labels, I can scan my inbox just by looking at the colors.

For example, I have filters that apply a red “Important!” label to emails sent to me by my manager, a purple “Vacation” label to emails that have “vacation” in the text, and a green “Industry News” label to emails that are sent to industry lists I subscribe to. Now when I open my email and see a bunch of red labeled messages, I know I have a lot of responding to do right away.

To set up a filter with a colored label, simply click the “Create a filter” link next to the search box. Add senders or certain words you want to keep a better eye on, click next, and assign a label by checking “apply the label” and choosing an appropriate one. Then just pick a label color by clicking the color swatch next to the label title in the left-hand navigation menu. Give colored labels with filters a try and see if it changes the way you read your inbox too.

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I have about eight friends from high school I like to keep in touch with frequently. We all email updates or the occasional funny YouTube video to the group, but every once in a while I’d forget to include one of them or I’d accidentally use one friend’s obsolete school address. I found a really useful solution for emailing small groups like this one that is easier to use with the new contact manager interface, which we launched in Gmail for IE7 and Firefox2. You can create custom “groups” of contacts so you don’t have to remember individual names or email addresses. You don’t create a true mailing list, per se — it’s just a simple way to email a handful of people at once.

To create contact groups, click “Contacts” from the left-hand navigation list and then click the groups icon:

After naming your group, browse for contacts you want to add to it. You can find them by clicking “All Contacts” or by searching by name or email address. Once you locate the contact you’d like to add to your group, click on the contact name, and select the “Groups” drop down menu in the right-most pane. You can add any contact to a group this way — or make impromptu new groups. (You can also add people to groups by clicking a group name and then typing email addresses or names in the search box at the bottom of the middle pane).

The great thing about creating contact groups is that they “auto-complete”: you can type the group name as you normally would type email addresses or contact names, and by selecting the group from the drop down menu, the group’s contacts are automatically inserted. Your email recipients will not see your group name when they receive the email, but instead will see all the individual contact names and email addresses listed as normal.

While this feature is great for creating efficient ways to email small groups, we encourage you to use Google Groups to manage large ones.

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