14 DAY TRIAL // Gmail is the mail solution provided by the Mountain View company that is currently available as a free public beta for all the Internet users. Since April 2004, when the product was released as a private beta version, Gmail received several major improvements such as the huge storage size or the recently introduced freeware license. However, Gmail has an impressive number of users but some of them are looking for more features from the mail solution. One of the requested features was obviously an improved interface as Gmail's appearance is quite simple.
Today, I'll present you an exciting Gmail extension that helps you modify the appearance of your mail solution. Gmail Skins, currently version 0.9.8, adds a lot of features to the Gmail interface, allowing you to modify almost 100 percent of the appearance. Besides the color of the window, you are able to move the menus above the emails, integrate your iGoogle near the inbox, insert Picasa albums into your emails, add smileys, emoticons and images to your messages.
The add-on is quite easy to use and can be configured straight from the interface of Gmail, just like the basic configurations of the mail solution. Please keep in mind that you must change the language of your account to EN-US because the plug-in is incompatible with other language.
These are the features of the extension as they are mentioned by the author:
* Change the color/skin of your inbox. * Integrate your google homepage alongside your inbox. This allows you to view weather reports, rss feeds, news headlines, flickr recently added, google calendar module etc from your inbox. * Easily insert images from your Picasa web album in to your emails * Insert smileys/emoticons and images in to your emails. * Insert HTML tables and other complex HTML in to your emails. * Make the navigation (Inbox, Starred, Sent Mail, etc) horizontal. * Fix the navigation in place so that you don't have to scroll to the top of the page to see it. * Zebra stripes on mailbox - pretty! * Change the attachment paperclip (on inbox) to an icon indicating the type of attachment. * Hide various page elements (invite panel, page footer, your email address from the top right of inbox).