Flour Power

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.