The Revenge of The GMail - This Time It's Prepared

The new features continue to dazzle everyone that's on the receiving end and to make proud those who know they did their part and did it well on the delivering end.

It's rather hectic to come to the office early Monday morning with the will and desire to work like a mule and be greeted with something like "Did you check your mail?" instead of the usual every day boredom face that doesn't even bother to smile anymore. Jump in your chair, you're your computer, type in the GMail address and� voil�! Nothing! "What's with the mail, I haven't received anything worth reading", I turned with a raised eyebrow to the soon-to-be-called-a-bitch-in-my-mind colleague that was browsing through her mail.

"It's not that, check out the updated features", she returned the not too friendly look. And I did. And it got interesting all of a sudden, on Monday morning. I hardly could have thought it possible ..but it was.

First off, you have got to understand that I'm the type of person that needs a lot of neatness in his mail, who labels everything and sets up filters against spam on a regular basis. Hence the use of the word "hectic". What does GMail do now that it did not do before? Tricks. Tricks to help the user's experience be a lot smoother.

You got your "filter messages like this" option when you are reading a message from a mailing list, to filter the right messages from the List-ID header, you have the option to "mute" the replies from a conversation you're not that keen on following, you got your "archive and next" shortcuts in place and working (it's the "[" and "]" characters on the keyboard, the first will archive the reply you are reading and go to the next oldest message in your inbox, the other does the same and goes to the next newest message). You got your browser navigation and history well documented and working, all you need to do is use the browser's "back" and "forward" buttons for the job of jumping back and forth through your emails.

Heh, this just made my day a lot better. Time to label and bookmark some more now.