Posted by Mark Knichel, Software EngineerRich text signatures have long been one of our most widely requested features. Some of you have tried your own solutions, including Greasemonkey scripts, browser plugins, and even using canned responses from Gmail Labs. Others have simply lived with frustration of not being able to change the colors or font size of your signature, or insert images and links. Either way, you'll be happy to know that today we're launching the ability to write your own rich text signatures right in Gmail.The next time you log in and visit the Settings page, you'll see a rich text editor in the signature section. Here, you can customize your signature by adding pretty formatting, links, and images — or decide to leave things nice and simple.Gmail also now supports a unique signature for each email address associated with your account. So, if you send mail using a custom "From:" address, you can use a different signature for that address. From the Settings page, you can edit the signature for each account by changing the email address that appears in the dropdown menu. Currently, only the latest desktop version of Gmail supports rich text signatures and multiple signatures. The older version and HTML version of Gmail, along with the mobile versions, use a plain text version of your primary account’s signature.

Posted by Marc Miller, Software EngineerIf you receive Microsoft® Word files as attachments in Gmail, you can now view them with a single click — no need to download, save, and open files with a desktop application when you just want read them. The Google Docs viewer that allows you to view .pdf, .ppt, and .tiff files in your browser now supports .doc and .docx formats too. Just click the "View" link at the bottom of a Gmail message and the viewer will take it from there. If you decide you want to edit the file, clicking "Edit online" will open it in Google Docs, or you can download it to your desktop from there.

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Product Marketing ManagerThe more I use Google Docs, the less I have to deal with sending attachments back and forth. While attachments' days may be waning, they're still very much a part of most people's email experience. Here are five things you may not know you can do with Gmail to make sending, receiving, viewing, and finding attachments easier:1. Drag attachments in Simply drag files from your desktop right into the message you're composing and they'll upload from there. (Make sure you're using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox 3.6 for this to work.)2. Select multiple attachmentsAttaching multiple files one by one is no fun. Instead, just multi-select the files you want to attach by holding down the Ctrl key (or Command on a Mac) and clicking on each file you want to attach. Holding down the Shift key will select a continuous list of files. 3. Never forget an attachment again Gmail looks for phrases in your email that suggest you meant to attach a file (things like "I've attached" or "see attachment") and warns you if it looks like you forgot to do so. Every day, this saves tons of people the embarrassment of having to send a follow up email with the file actually attached.4. View attachments onlineWhen you receive an attachment, sometimes you just want to view it and there's no need to download or save to your desktop. The Google Docs viewer allows you to view .pdf, .ppt, and .tiff files in your browser. Just click the "View" link at the bottom of the message.5. Find that long lost attachment via search If you're looking for an attachment someone has sent to you, Gmail's advanced search operators can help you find what you're looking for quickly and accurately. A couple examples:To find all messages that contain attachments: has:attachmentTo find all messages from your friend David that contain attachments: from:david has:attachmentTo find all messages that have .pdf attachments: has:attachment pdfTo find a specific attachment named physicshomework.txt: filename:physicshomework.txt

Posted by Michael Davidson, Software EngineerI recently posted about Gmail's fast new windows and explained that the only downside of them was that they closed when the main Gmail window closed. Today, we're changing that. If you're using the latest version of Google Chrome, you can now continue to work in popped out windows after you close your main window (especially handy for those of us who always like to keep an eye on our tasks). For the technically curious among you, our friends on the Chrome team made it possible to transfer the code that runs Gmail from one window to another as the window closes. When the window that hosts the code fires an unload event, we move the iframe with the code to a surviving window. Everything continues to run, including timers and outstanding requests.

Posted by Josh Teague, User Experience DesignerVideo chat, voice chat, and group chat have all been available for some time within Gmail, but they've been curiously tucked away. Getting them up and running required fidgeting with a little menu at the bottom of each chat window. Starting today, all of these features will be just a single click away.One of the more subtle benefits to surfacing these chat options is that it's easier for people to get started who don't yet have the voice and video chat plugin. If your chat buddy doesn't have the plugin, clicking on this icon in the chat window will invite them to install it. As soon as they're done, you can carry on with a face-to-face video chat. Since we launched a similar feature on iGoogle and orkut a little while ago, we've seen a dramatic uptick in people using video chat.Finally, you'll find oldie but goodie features such as "Go off the record," "Block", and "Send SMS" in a more aptly named "Actions" menu of each chat window.

Posted by Mark Knichel, Software EngineerI often receive emails containing addresses in them &mdash where to meet for dinner, the location of my friend's new apartment, etc. To find out where these places actually are, I have to copy the address, open up Google Maps, and paste it in. Today, we're making it easier to see maps of all the addresses you receive in Gmail and Google Buzz.Enable "Google Maps previews in mail" from the Gmail Labs tab under Settings, and any time you receive an address or a Google Maps link in an email, a preview will appear containing an interactive Google Map of that location. Any Google Maps URL will work, but we currently only extract US addresses (we're working on making addresses around the world work).Additionally, when you paste a Google Maps link into the post box in Google Buzz, it'll automatically fetch an image preview of that location that you can associate with your post.Please let us know if you have any feedback.

Posted by Greg Bullock, Software EngineerThe icon column in Gmail helps to easily distinguish the various types of items in your inbox (e.g. messages with attachments, chats, calendar invitations, Buzz posts, and more). It's usually all the way over on the right of the screen, but with screen sizes becoming increasingly wider, I chose to make a very modest addition to Gmail Labs to try and give these icons greater visibility.I found it much more useful to have this column situated on the far left of my inbox -- and it turns out that many of my colleagues did too.If you’d like try out "Move Icon Column," simply visit the Labs tab under Gmail Settings, find this new Lab in the list, hit enable, and then save. It’s not big and it’s not clever but hopefully this lab might just be helpful for you too; it's the little things in life after all.

Posted by Joe Ashear, User Experience DesignerWhen I came to Google four years ago, a small group of engineers was putting the finishing touches on a calendar application. A few of us started using it, and I remember thinking, "Wow! It's so fresh and shiny and new!"But over time the shiny new Calendar started to feel a little bit old, a little out of step with other Google Apps. So we rolled up our sleeves and we tweaked the layout, we twiddled the colors and we tuned the text...and this week we're pleased to show off a fresh new look for Google Calendar.If you use Tasks in Calendar, you'll discover another change: we've removed the old Tasks link. Now to turn Tasks on and off, just click the Tasks calendar in your calendar list. If you only want to see tasks with due dates — the ones above your calendar — you can hide the task list by clicking the tall blue bar that separates the calendar from the task list.

Posted by Michael Davidson, Software EngineerRecently, we launched a feature that allows you to drag an attachment from your computer right onto Gmail.I've always been a fan of the inserting image lab, so I naturally wondered if it would be possible to combine the two.Today we're launching a feature that allows you to drag images from your computer into a message. You don't have to have the insert image lab enabled for it to work. Just drag the image in, resize it if you want, and send.Currently, this feature only works in Google Chrome, but will be coming soon to other browsers.

Posted by Pavni Diwanji, Engineering DirectorA few weeks ago, I got an email presumably from a friend stuck in London asking for some money to help him out. It turned out that the email was sent by a scammer who had hijacked my friend's account. By reading his email, the scammer had figured out my friend's whereabouts and was emailing all of his contacts. Here at Google, we work hard to protect Gmail accounts against this kind of abuse. Today we're introducing a new feature to notify you when we detect suspicious login activity on your account.You may remember that a while back we launched remote sign out and information about recent account activity to help you understand and manage your account usage. This information is still at the bottom of your inbox. Now, if it looks like something unusual is going on with your account, we’ll also alert you by posting a warning message saying, "Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…" along with the geographic region that we can best associate with the access. To determine when to display this message, our automated system matches the relevant IP address, logged per the Gmail privacy policy, to a broad geographical location. While we don't have the capability to determine the specific location from which an account is accessed, a login appearing to come from one country and occurring a few hours after a login from another country may trigger an alert. By clicking on the "Details" link next to the message, you'll see the last account activity window that you're used to, along with the most recent access points. If you think your account has been compromised, you can change your password from the same window. Or, if you know it was legitimate access (e.g. you were traveling, your husband/wife who accesses the account was also traveling, etc.), you can click "Dismiss" to remove the message. Keep in mind that these notifications are meant to alert you of suspicious activity but are not a replacement for account security best practices. If you'd like more information on account security, read these tips on keeping your information secure or visit the Google Online Security Blog.Finally, we know that security is also a top priority for businesses and schools, and we look forward to offering this feature to Google Apps customers once we have gathered and incorporated their feedback.

Posted by David Marmaros, Software EngineerAs you can imagine, those of us on the Google Calendar team spend a lot of time thinking about scheduling. We regularly talk to people who schedule and reschedule a lot of meetings: administrative assistants. Talking to them, we understand just how much time they spend looking at schedules, investigating other people's calendars, finding replacement conference rooms and rescheduling conflicts. And then some manager's travel plans change and everything starts over again.If you're searching for something on the web, you don't just start randomly visiting pages looking for relevant content, you use a search engine. So we decided to apply some of Google's search experience to the problem of scheduling. We experimented with using ranking algorithms to return the most relevant meeting times based on specified criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times.Today we're launching the result of that experiment, a gadget called Smart Rescheduler, in Google Calendar Labs. Once you turn it on, just select an event you'd like to reschedule, then click "Find a new time...":You'll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby. This process is 100% automated — no Google employees are doing any work behind the scenes. You can refine the results by marking people as optional, changing the meeting duration, ignoring certain conflicts, or specifying the earliest and latest times you'll accept. The results will immediately update to reflect your new requirements.This feature is still experimental, so we'd love your ideas and feedback. Of course, we can't make meetings more interesting, but we can try to save you frustration leading up to them.

Posted by Emmanuel Pellereau, Software EngineerMy little sister recently setup her Gmail account to retrieve messages from her school address, so she can check all of her email accounts in one place. She no longer has to constantly log in to two email programs, and she likes using Gmail's powerful interface for all her mail.However, sometimes she knows an email has already been sent to her school address, and she just can't wait for the next scheduled fetch to have it show up in her Gmail inbox. As any big brother would, I tried to solve this issue for her and millions of Gmail users.Turn on "Refresh POP accounts" from the Labs tab under Settings, and the refresh link at the top of your inbox will not only update your inbox with your new Gmail messages, it will also fetch messages from any other accounts which you have set up. Try it out, and let us know if you have any feedback.

Posted by Michael Davidson, Software EngineerOne of the lesser-known features of Gmail is its ability to help with multitasking. Frequently, I find that I need to find an old message while I'm composing an email. When this happens, I click on the "new window\" icon to pop my compose area into its own window:There's only one problem — it's been slow! Today, we're rolling out a change that will fix this (reload your account to make sure you get this change). Now, popping out a window is much, much faster. No more "Loading..." progress bar. There are a number of places you can pop up new windows in Gmail.In chat, there's the little upward arrow in the title bar:When writing a message, hold the "Shift" key while you click on the Compose Mail, Reply, Reply All or Forward links and you'll get a new window for your new message. (Holding the "Shift" key while typing the keyboard shortcut — in other words typing "C" "R" or "F" — has the same effect.)When you're reading your mail, hold the "Shift" key while you click on a message to open the conversation in a new window. (Same holds true for the "Shift" key and the "o" or "Enter" shortcuts.)If you're reading an email and want to save it for later, you can click the "New window\" link in the upper-right hand corner of the conversation view:Keep in mind that the popped out window does not outlive the closing of the original Gmail window, although we're working on a way to make that better. Unfortunately, we weren't able to make this work in Internet Explorer, so to see the speed-up, you'll need to be using Mozilla Firefox, Apple's Safari, or Google Chrome.

Posted by Mark Knichel, Software EngineerWe launched Gmail Labs over a year and a half ago as a playground where engineers can come up with new features and let your input help decide which are good ideas and which don't quite work out. Any engineer at Google can come up with feature, code it, and launch it quickly to tens of millions of users.Labs started out with 13 features and quickly grew to 60, with even more on the way. We've received countless comments and kept an eye on our stats: some of these experimental features were adopted by millions and others trickled along with little usage. A couple have already graduated from Labs and we've already retired one: Tasks was the first to become a regular part of Gmail, Right-side Labels was retired when we updated the way labels work, and Offline Gmail graduated a couple months back. Today, true to the original intent of Gmail Labs, we're graduating six more features and retiring five.Graduating:Search AutocompleteGo To LabelForgotten Attachment DetectorYouTube PreviewsCustom Label ColorsVacation DatesRetiring:MuzzleFixed Width FontEmail AddictLocation in SignatureRandom SignatureThese decisions were made based based mainly on usage, taking feature polish and your feedback into account. We've also tweaked some of the graduating features to improve them before making them default Gmail features. For example, we've combined Go To Label with Search Autocomplete, making it easier than ever for you to find what you're looking for. Search Autocomplete and Go To LabelStart typing in the Gmail search box (English only for now), and Gmail suggests terms that might help you find what you're looking for — from contact names to labels and advanced search operators. We've integrated Go To Label into this search box as well. If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, type "g" then "l" and instead of getting the old "Go to label" pop-up, you'll be in the search box with the "label:" operator filled in for you. Start typing the label you want to go to, and autocomplete will take it from there. All you have to do is hit enter. If you want to send your cursor to the blank search field, the keyboard shortcut "/" will do it.Forgotten Attachment DetectorFrom time to time, we all forget to attach a file and sheepishly send another email with the forgotten attachment. To help save you from that embarrassment, Gmail looks for phrases in your email that suggest you meant to attach a file and alerts you if it looks like you forgot an attachment. YouTube PreviewsIf you're like me, your friends probably often email you links to YouTube videos. Instead of having to clicking on the link and wait for a new window to load before you can watch the video, Gmail now shows YouTube previews right below the message. All you have to do is click the play button and enjoy.Custom Label ColorsWhy settle for a restrictive palette when you can choose from over 4000 possible color combinations to help distinguish and organize your labels? Just click on "Add custom color" from the regular labels interface.Vacation DatesIf you specify which dates you'll be away in advance, you won't have to remember to turn on the vacation responder when when you're actually on vacation. Set your dates in advance, and let Gmail do the rest.Retiring features is always a tough decision — we invest in building and maintaining them and we realize some of you are probably fans of some of Gmail's lesser-used features. But Labs are experimental features, and from time to time they may break (that's why there's a quick way to disable them), or even disappear. Over the next few days, you'll see Muzzle, Fixed Width Font, Email Addict, Location in Signature, and Random Signature stop working and disappear from the Labs tab. We'll keep working on new Labs to help make your Gmail experience even better, and we'll continue to graduate successful features and retire the ones that don’t work out to make room for new ones. Thank you to all the engineers who have worked on Labs features — especially Bruce, Darick, Jon (the intern), Ibrahim, Chris, Keith, Chad, Michael, and Marco! Please continue to send us feedback and remember that you vote for your favorite Labs features by using them and leaving comments.

Posted by John Costigan, Software EngineerNow that people have been playing with Google Buzz in Gmail for a week and we've rolled out the improvements we announced here over the weekend, we wanted to let you know about some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Buzz. Here are five tips to get you started: 1. Format your posts. When posting in Buzz, you can format text just as you can in Gmail chat: bold, italics, or -strikethrough- all work.2. View a summary of your own Buzz activity at http://www.google.com/dashboard. The Google Dashboard provides a private, consolidated summary of the data associated with your Google account, as well as direct links to control your personal settings. As of today, Buzz has its own section on the Dashboard, so you can see how many people you're following, how many people are following you, and information about your recent posts, comments, and likes. You can also access your Buzz settings right there on the page.3. Use an @reply to send a post directly to someone's inbox. If you want to make sure one of your friends sees a certain Buzz post, you can direct it to their inbox with an @reply. Type the "@" symbol followed by the first few letters of their name, and select their email address from the list. Only you'll see their Gmail address — other people will just see their name.4. Try keyboard shortcuts to fly through buzz. Turn on keyboard shortcuts from Settings, and use "j" or "n" to scroll down the buzz tab, "k" or "p" to go back up, "r" to comment (same shortcut as reply in Gmail), and "shift + l" to like.5. Mute posts so they don't get sent to your inbox. Comments on your posts and comments after your comments send buzz directly to your inbox. If you don't want a lively conversation to keep appearing in your inbox as people reply to it, you can mute it. Click the arrow in the corner of a buzz post and select "Mute this post."If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, you can also mute buzz that appears in your inbox by hitting the "m" key while you're reading it. Check out our Help Center for more tips and answers to your common questions, and stay tuned for more here as well.

Posted by Edward Ho, Tech Lead, Google BuzzFive years ago, Gmail was just email. Later we added chat and then video chat, both built right in, so people had choices about how to communicate from a single browser window. Today, communication on the web has evolved beyond email and chat — people are sharing photos with friends and family, commenting on news happening around them, and telling the world what they're up to in real-time. This new social sharing is valuable, but it means there's a lot more stuff to sort through, and it's harder to get past status updates and engage in meaningful discussions.Today, we're launching Google Buzz, a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting and share updates, photos, videos and more. Buzz is built right into Gmail, so there's nothing to set up — you're automatically following the people you email and chat with the most.We focused on making the sharing experience really rich by integrating photos, videos, and links. No more fuzzy little pictures: Buzz makes it easy to quickly flip through photos and experience them the way they were meant to be seen: big and full-resolution. And videos play inline so you can watch them without opening a new window.You can choose to share publicly with the world or privately to a small group of friends each time you post. And you can connect other sites you use, today there's Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader, and Twitter, so your friends can keep up with what you're doing around the web — all in one place.To make sure you don't miss out on the best part of sharing, Buzz sends responses to your posts straight to your inbox. Unlike static email messages, buzz messages in your inbox are live conversations where comments appear in real time. You can follow the specific people whose posts you want to see, but Buzz also recommends posts from people you're not directly following, often ones where your friends are having a lively conversation in the comments. If you're not interested in a particular recommendation, just click the "Not interested" link and your feedback will help improve the recommendations system. Buzz also weeds out uninteresting posts from the people you follow — collapsing inactive posts and short status messages like "brb." These early versions of ranking and recommendations are just a start; we're working on improvements that will help you automatically sort through all the social data being produced to find the most relevant conversations that matter to you. For all those times when you want to share something but aren't in front of your computer, Buzz is also available on your phone. When you're out in the real world, a lot of the information you want to share often has to do with where you are: for example, you may want to talk about a new restaurant you discovered or the score of the game you're watching. So rather than simply a small screen version of the desktop experience, Buzz for mobile brings location to the forefront and makes it easy to have conversations about places. In addition to checking out buzz from people you're following, you can also see nearby buzz from the people around you. We'll be rolling out Google Buzz to everyone over the next few days; you'll see a new "Buzz" link under "Inbox" when it's on for your account. We're still working on some features to make Buzz work well for businesses and schools, so it isn't yet available in Google Apps, but stay tuned. If you want to learn more in the meantime, visit buzz.google.com.

Posted by Adam de Boor, Software EngineerHello again. I've been taking advantage of my 20% time to make some improvements in the Google Search lab I told you about last April. For starters, I've hooked up a bunch of Google's most popular search features, including:Dictionary definitions: use a keyword like "define" in English and you'll see the first definition of the word, with a link to the dictionary from which it came.Spelling corrections: if you mistype something in your search, Google’s spell checking software will automatically ask if you meant a more common spelling of that word (especially helpful when looking up a new word).Calculations: type in an arithmetic expression and you'll get the result. In this case the "Paste result" option from the result's pop-up menu will actually paste the result of the computation.Local results: you can search for a particular place or for things near a particular place (map results will show up in a few weeks — they're a little broken by our recent switch to use https). The "More info" link will take you to the place page.Weather: just type "weather" followed by the city and state, zip code, or city and country.News: if your query matches something in the news, we'll show you one hit and an indication of how many related articles there are, with a link to go see them.In addition, you can now use this Labs feature in any available Gmail language and you'll get search results that match your preferred language. Finally, as some folks have already noticed, I added a search button to the toolbar when you're composing a message:If you've got text selected when you click it, Gmail will search for that text. If you don't have text selected, you'll just get a search box where you can start typing. That's all for this installment. As always, we welcome your feedback.

Posted by Christos Apartoglou, Product Marketing Manager, Google ChromeThere's always that email. You know the one I'm talking about: the message we're waiting for so anxiously that we end up checking our inbox 100 times a minute to see whether it's arrived. Since last Monday, I've stopped being a manic tab switcher and the F5 key on my keyboard has breathed a sigh of relief — all thanks to the Google Mail extension in Google Chrome.Extensions are small programs that help you customize your browsing experience. They can give you quick access to your favorite websites like Weather.com or eBay, provide alerts or updates from sites like Woot.com or NPR, or help you perform common online tasks such as getting driving directions or simply change the look and feel of your browser.The Google Mail extension adds a nifty little button next to Google Chrome's address bar that provides an updated indicator of the unread messages in your inbox. It also lets you access your inbox with just one click. There's also a Send from Gmail extension which makes Gmail your default email application and opens a compose window whenever you click an email address on a webpage. It also adds a new button next to the address bar that makes it easy to send an email directly from Gmail, pre-filling the subject of the message with the title of the web page you're currently on and the body with selected page text and the link address. There are several other Gmail extensions that the Google Chrome developer community has written; you can check out these and more than 2,000 other extensions in the Google Chrome Extensions gallery. Google Chrome Extensions are now available for all Windows users. For those of you on Linux, extensions are enabled on the beta channel. Mac users, hang tight — extensions are coming to the beta soon.

Posted by Dominik Marcinski, Software EngineerManaging a big address book can be a challenge, so it's no surprise that the top request for Google contacts is a fast, easy way to merge duplicate contacts. You've been able to merge contacts one-by-one for a while, but now we've added a single button that merges all your duplicate contacts at once. To clean up your contact list in one fell swoop, just click the "Find duplicates" button in the contact manager, review the merge suggestions (and uncheck any suggestions you don't want merged), and hit the "Merge" button.If you've been considering getting all your contacts into Gmail or syncing your Gmail contacts to your phone, now's the time to do it. As we've written about previously, you can sync your contacts to a wide variety of devices (including Android, iPhone, Blackberry, SyncML, etc). So if you were dreading spending hours getting your contacts in order, now you can do it with a couple clicks.

Posted by Andy Palay, Software EngineerOne of the most requested features for Offline Gmail has been the ability to include attachments in messages composed while offline. Starting today, attachments work just the way you would expect them to whether you are online or offline (with the exception that when you're offline you won't be able to include inline images). Just add the attachment and send your message.If you have Offline Gmail enabled, you'll notice that all your mail now goes through the outbox, regardless of whether you're online or offline. This allows Gmail to capture all attachments, even if you suddenly get disconnected from network. If you're online, your mail will quickly be sent along to its destination.If you haven't tried offline access yet, visit the Labs tab and follow these instructions to get started:Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.Click Save Changes.After your browser reloads, you'll see a new "Offline" link in the upper righthand corner of the Gmail page, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don't already have it.Now that you can send attachments while offline, we'd love to see pictures of you using Gmail in unusual places while you're disconnected from the web. Pictures of you using Gmail in an airplane, igloo, or submarine are all welcome. Email your photo to hikingfan@gmail.com and we'll post the most interesting ones here.