I haven’t had a cool toys post about something web related in awhile. I got the idea for this kind post from a friend whom I told him something cool, and he said “HEY you need to share your cool toys!”

It used to be it was cool to have @my-awesome-website.com email addresses. Having your own domain (I’m not a business owner, so I am not considering the cases where you want a certain domain for your email). Ahh, the days of squirelmail and thunderbird. Now you can have gmail on your domain, so that makes gmail even more cool. To have the power of gmail and the cool factor of having your own domain for email. I finally got my mom to switch to gmail from hotmail. I shuddered whenever she was with me and borrowed my laptop, went to hotmail.com … yikes!!

Here are some cool toys I’ve found in gmail labs! Labs? wuts that? Go to Settings, click on Labs. Tons of toys.

Multiple Inboxes
I admit, I was resistant to labels for a long time. Where are my folders!?? why is this mail always there? I added labels sometimes, but I never archived. It was still there in my inbox. I always had thousands of emails in my inbox. I used to think that archive was some “compression” thing you could do to zip your mail on googles server. I started reading Getting Things Done book and one way to use that system is with folders in your email. I email myself a task, add a label and archive it. I get an email from someone I need to act on, add the action label. But, then I would have to click on my tasks label on the left, page loads, then I see all my tasks. When I found out about multiple inboxes, I found I was able to divide my inbox screen in two sections: actions, inbox. Now I have my actions visible at all times and I can easily click and remove action label and archive when its complete. This is what really has helped using email as my task list useful. At work I even have a third inbox showing my starred items. I star things I want to read, but don’t have time at the moment.

Tip: Send and email to yourself at yourname+action@gmail.com and then you can filter all incoming emails that come to that address to automatically apply a label! It still comes to you as normal. I use this alot.

Chat on the right
I like my chat on the right, so I can have my label on the left. You can enable this in labs too.

Send & Archive
Does both actions at once! Helps keep the inbox cleared out. Though I sometimes have problems with this while on the train, apparently it takes a few more bits of power for teh internet tubes to do do these two actions at same time.

Title Tweeks
Shows the inbox count in the title bar first, easier to see when you have lots of tabs open.

Google Calendar Gadget
Shows your calendar on the left side under labels. Nice to see what is coming up next.


Google Docs Gadget
I dont often use this actually. I should, I’m always typing in docs.google.com in the browser. I do use it to get to a recent document I created.


Gmail offline
I used this before I had an aircard. It was nice to compose emails offline, then send then when i got net access.

I think that’s about it!! And the other awesome thing about gmail is that it is super cool on android…but thats another blog post!