14 DAY TRIAL // Some of the best and most innovative Gmail features are not available in the default app, you have to start digging through Labs to find them. For power users, there's plenty to like through the tweaks, small features and enhancements found in Labs. Proving that point, Google has just graduated three Labs features and implemented them in the default version of the webmail app.
"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," Maciek Nowakowski, Associate Product Manager at Google, announced
"We’re also retiring the Google Search box lab which was redundant with the 'Search the Web' button that’s already in Gmail," he added.
One of the features leaving Labs is Superstars, a tool which enables you to customize Gmail stars. Normally, you can star a message to save it for later and that's it.
With Superstars, you can assign different star types to different messages to make it easier to distinguish among them. There are several stars available, you can select the ones you want to use from the settings page and then cycle through them by clicking on the star icon next to the message.
Nested Labels is another Labs feature graduated, as the name implies it enables users to have sub-labels and label groups for a more thorough management. It also comes in handy if you're more used to folders rather than labels.
For those using Gmail as an email provider, but not necessarily the Gmail web app, the new Advanced IMAP settings, which are now available to all, should prove useful.
With these three graduations, Google also removed a Labs feature that is now redundant. The Google Search box, which obviously, added a google search feature to Gmail is no longer needed since there is a Search the Web button next to the regular search field.