Flour Power

Do you want to get rid of those "Sponsored Links" on the right side of every email in Gmail? Well, now you can, without using any kind of ad-blocker thingy. Just add a few words to your email, and you'll never see those ads again.

In his personal blog, Joe McKay shares his experience in blocking Gmail's sponsored ads using words referencing tragic or catastrophic events as well as words from George Carlin's infamous list of seven words you can't say on TV. Since Google bans those words from its ads, if there are enough of them in the email, no ads will be displayed (Joe found that there needs to be a ratio of one ad-blocking word for every 167 normal words).

But you can't just litter every email with those kinds of words, can you? That's where they smart guys at Lifehacker come in. They devised a signature that, while not offensive, effectively gets rid of the ads. And it's also quite funny:

I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a messy bloodbath.

Before:

After:

Neat, uh?

(via Lifehacker)

One more day, one more Gmail Labs feature!

If the last one (Youtube, Picasa, Flickr and Yelp previews) was all about improving the user experience by saving time and providing some extra eye-candy, this one has a very specific objective. It's just a big red "panic" button. Well, it's not really red or big, it's just a small Undo link, but it sure can avoid some problems.

Have you ever sent a message and immediately noticed an error? Like a forgotten attachment, a terrible typo right there on the subject or there's someone in the To: field that absolutely shouldn't receive the email? Up until now, there was nothing you could do. As soon as the Send button was pressed, there was no going back.

Well by enabling this "Undo Send" feature, sent email will be on hold for 5 seconds before being actually sent, and you can press the Undo link to stop it. This goes hand in hand with the "Mail Goggles" feature, which requires you to complete a few math problems before any mail is sent, to avoid those late night inebriated-induced messages.

As an improvement, though, the delay should be configurable.

Eh, this is quite neat. There's a new Gmail Labs feature that enables previews in messages that contain links to Youtube videos, Flickr and Picasa photos and Yelp reviews. So, with the Youtube Previews feature enabled, if someone sends me an email with some Youtube links, this is what I'll see:

Very handy indeed. No need to click through to Youtube. I can watch the videos right from inside Gmail. Too bad it doesn't work on playlists.

And a link to a Picasa Web Album turns into:

If you want to link to individual pictures, though, you'll have to pay attention to the link you're sending. Be sure to copy it from the address bar, don't use the "Link to this photo" option on the right side of Picasa Web Albums. For example:

http://picasaweb.google.com/farinha/KrakowMar08#5201735599173133954 - Works
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/Xtusb0M4D12GFJ8inb6C1A?feat=directlink - Does not work

Flickr previews work in the same way. Both album and single picture links work:

To activate these features just go to Settings, then choose the Labs tab and enable the ones you want.

(via Gmail Blog)

Microsoft finally enabled POP3 access in Hotmail. It’s really amazing that it took so long for them to actually do it, and if this is an attempt to revive the defunct service, I guess they’re a bit too late. No one uses Hotmail anymore, except as a junk collector – the emails address used for those one-time visits to websites that require registration. The clunky interface and the amount of spam made people gradually change to better email providers like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail, and I don’t see them going back to using their old account.

Anyway, one good thing about this new feature, is that it enables checking the Hotmail inbox from inside Gmail. To set it up you just need to add a mail account by going to Settings then Accounts and click Add a mail account you own. Use the following settings to set it up:

POP server: pop3.live.com
Port: 995
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail? Yes

I additionally ticked the option to leave a copy of the retrieved messages on the server. I always do that when fetching mails from other account into Gmail as a way to have a backup.

With all this set up, all it takes is waiting some time for all the messages to be fetched (took a few hours to get my 1000 and something messages).

It’s not that I’m going to start using Hotmail again (the email address is one of those silly ones that I wouldn’t give to anyone now…), but every once in a while I get a message from an old colleague that still has it in his contact book. And since it’s also my MSN Messenger account (oh, how I wish everyone stopped using this and just moved to Google Talk…) where I have a lot of contacts, I can’t get rid of it. At least now I have a decent interface and Gmail’s spam filter will keep my inbox much cleaner.

Last Tuesday Gmail had a 3 hours outage and it seemed like the world was going to end, considering all the Twitter and Facebook cries of panic. It's clear that a lot of people rely on Gmail as a work tool, and the possibility of such "glitches" happening is something to worry about. But there are a few things you can do when it seems you can't access your Gmail account properly:

• Maybe the problem is just with your connection, and not with Gmail itself. You can find out about the status on Gmail and several other Google apps in their Google Apps Status Dashboard;
• If the web interface is not loading properly, you can try accessing the more secure SSL interface or the basic HTML mode;
• You can also access your email using POP or IMAP on any email client of your choice. During the outage this was the only way of accessing Gmail, but you had to have it enabled, which can only be done through the web interface (Gmail settings/ Forwarding and POP, IMAP). It's probably a good idea to just enable it even if you don't plan on using anything besides the web interface. Just in case... 

So the next time Gmail seems to be down, don't panic. First try the items above. And if none of them works, then you can panic

If you're tired of the same old Gmail look and you don't like any of the provided themes, you can now customize the "Default" theme with your own colours. You just need to go to Settings > Themes and click "Choose your own colors" to start editing your favorite colors for Gmail's background, links, text messages, navigation links and more.

So if you love purple, now you can stare at it every day. The color picker also allows people with visual disabilities to tweak Gmail into something more comfortable for them, whether it's increasing the contrast between colors or ridding their inbox of bright white.

You can always go back to the defaults by using the reset button.

(via Official Gmail Blog)

The guys at Gmail have been busy lately, and just a few days after releasing offline support for Gmail, here comes another feature - Multiple Inboxes.

The name might be a bit misleading, since what this feature really does is providing a way to have multiple views of your email available at the same time and without having to open another browser window/tab.

Multiple Inboxes is available as an option in Gmail labs. Just go to Settings -> Labs and enable it. You'll then get a new "Multiple Inboxes" tab in the Settings, where you can set up what "inboxes" you want to appear in Gmail next to the regular mail. The way to specify the contents of each "inbox" is by using Gmail's advanced search operators. It's also possible to change how many results show up in each "inbox" and the position of the new tabs: above, below or to the right of the regular Inbox.

It's a handy feature for those of us who like to keep the Inbox tidy and just filter most email so that it gets labelled and archived on arrival, and then have to click through all the labels to read it.

It took some time, but the Google folks finally did it. It is now possible to use Gmail while offline:

Today we're starting to roll out an experimental feature in Gmail Labs that should help fill in those gaps: offline Gmail. So even if you're offline, you can open your web browser, go to gmail.com, and get to your mail just like you're used to.

Offline Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of the mail and as long as there's an active Internet connection, that cache is synchronized with Gmail's servers. When the connection is lost, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored locally instead of sending/fetching it across the network. It's possible to access almost all of Gmail's features while offline, and those will be automatically synchronized with Gmail's servers when there's an Internet connection available. There are some features missing, though: it's not possible to add attachments, the contact manager is not available offline, and it's not possible to customize which messages to download. Gmail uses some algorithms to determine which messages to cache locally: in my case it downloaded 3 months of email (some labels were downloaded completely, while Spam and Trash were ignored), including attachments, which amounted to about 280MB.

This should come in handy for those that rely a lot on email but can't be connected all the time. It's now possible to get some inbox cleaning done while commuting, or on an airplane. And as the Gmail team point out, it's a good solution for those with crappy connections:

And if you're on an unreliable or slow connection (like when you're "borrowing" your neighbor's wireless), you can choose to use "flaky connection mode," which is somewhere in between: it uses the local cache as if you were disconnected, but still synchronizes your mail with the server in the background.

The setup couldn't be easier. Just go to Settings > Labs, enable it (you'll have to install Gears if you don't have it yet.) and after the browser is reloaded press the "Offline" link on the top right menu. It will take some time downloading everything, though.