“Ah! I have sent the mail which I shouldn’t have sent!” – How many of you have thought of this when you send a wrong email to a person?
Answer is most of us. Think if we could just pull back our email and be more cautious next time. Your wishes are granted as Google has just rolled out a new lab feature where we can undo the sent mail and avoid mistakes!
Though this Undo button cant pull back the email which is already sent, but gives you some 5 seconds time to “Undo” it and then the message disappears and the mail is sent.
As all the Lab features, you will have to select it and ‘turn it on’ to function. You can do it by going to your Lab setting page of your Gmail account.
Added by Editor: How about Gmail giving option to specify delay? 5 seconds is too small! What do you think?
[Editor Note:Abhishek Jain is from Bangalore. He blogs at www.fun2ssh.co.cc about freebies/Discounts/Vouchers/Gifts and other stuff.
I have heard about scheduling emails although never used it. I also think timestamps an email carry are automatically generated when it is sent/received by concerned user. But check following Gmail screenshot and have a look at arrows.
(Click on above link to enlarge it. That way you will be able to see time and date of my system as well as timestamp on email properly.)
Now if you have observed that mail says it was sent on Mar 19, 2009 at 12:39 PM, but I received it around Mar 19, 2009 at 12:o8 AM.
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Even-though date is same and time looks same there is a difference of around 12 hours because of AM/PM. It might have gone unnoticed hadn’t Gmail showed something like -751 minutes ago, a negative value!
Next question is whether its a Gmail bug or….
Can date (timestamp) in Email be forged?
Some people claims that they can change date & time of their system clocks and then emails sent will carry timestamp of their system time. Might have worked in past, but now as far as I know SMTP serves involves in forwarding mails assigns timestamp on them. I may be inaccurate to some extents but timestamps cannot be controlled in most cases.
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In some cases, like in private network or so, you may hack into system to alter
Still forging “From” email address works because SMTP servers do not care about it. Whether to authenticate “From:” address filed is responsibility assigned to applications. You can authorize your application to send emails from another email ids. Procedure to do so for Gmail is here and for Yahoo its here.
So it isn’t feature in Gmail but seems some coder from Gmail team took their prank seriously and decided to play with it!
Jokes apart, this bug can create confusion. What if I had remained offline from 12:05 AM to say 1PM on March 19. Then at the time of checking mails I might have thought that I just recived this mail and can reply it later. At the other end, the person who might be awaiting a reply needs to wait more!
I have two Gmail accounts, one is my personal email and second is of my blog. Last week, I found out how to integrate both the email addresses so that I could change the “From” field and send an email from any account. It does not matter from which account you are logged in.
A new feature is introduced in Gmail Labs recently, which allow us to import/export filters created in Gmail. After enabling this feature, you can go to Gmail Settings >> Filters and select one or more filters to export/import.
I use many Gmail accounts to serve different purpose and copying filters from one Gmail account to another was always tedious. Thankfully, we can now, not-only backup filters but we can share them with other Gmail users.
Filters, if you have never used it before, is one of the most lucrative feature of Gmail which simplifies many day-to-day tasks. Combined with labels (another Gmail feature), its power is awesome.
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Few things I do with filters are:
Automatically assign “backup” label to wordpress database backup I receive via email. If something goes wrong on any of our blog, things can be recovered from latest backup easily.
There are many mailing lists I have subscribed to. But I don’t get much free time to read them, so I again filter them our of my inbox and catch up with them on a lazy weekend.
Some emails like those form banks, your webhosting company, etc are often more important than others. Any morning Gmail welcomes me with around 100 mails in inbox (after filtering another 100 mails using filters as described above), so filter automatically star such important emails for me, making it easy to can pay attention to them.
How import/export filters feature can avoid spamming…
Success of Facebook, Orkut, MySpace and other social networks resulted in large number of social networks being created everyday around Internet. One thing I hate about all these social networks is, the moment you register an account, they suggest you to invite all of your friends to that network.
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I hate this because this kind of inviting results in lots of junk mails in my inbox which waste a lot of time and energy. Not all these emails carry unsubscribe link and some carries in a way that makes hard to figure them out.
So I always wanted to create a set of filters which will redirect such invitation mails directly to trash. Now as we can share filters, it will be nice idea to create a public set of filters dedicated to these (anti)social networks!
This idea can be extended to other fields like filtering emails containing junk like “Win iPod”, “Fill Survey and earn $$$”, “Free your cellphone bills”, “Crush Finder”, etc.
Why can’t we just mark such mails as SPAM?
As creating a filter takes little more time compared to clicking “Report Spam” button, one must be wondering why I want all of us to go through hassle of importing/exporting filters! Here are reasons…
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First Report Spam may not work always. Because Report Spam is sort of global feature. When many people start reporting mails from a particular server as spam, then only some action is taken.
These junk mails use your friends name and/or email address in FROM: field. Reporting spam may filter out future mails form your friends as spam.
Moreover, all of us need to click on “Report Spam” button for every individual mail. Worst, we wont get all much invitation mails in a single day so it will waste our small amount of time almost everyday. So better import a “global” set of filters which will transparently take care of such emails everyday!
But there is a downside to filters as well…
If someone can get temporary access to your account, he/she can use filters smartly to forward emails to their address. A bug in Gmail in past helped a cracker install such filters without any access to Gmail account. It ended up in a infamous domain hijacking incident. (read more)
So filters must be scanned thoroughly before you import them into your Gmail account. May be Google itself can provide a common place where Gmail users can search and share filters easily and safely!
Since more than six months I was curious to know about how can I embed HTML signatures so that I can show off my presence in social networking sites to whoever I send mails to. This is just a geeky way, I wanted to show off among my friends, relatives and clients. But I prevented using a third party script or add-on for HTML Email signatures, because all of them I found earlier were not as good as WiseStamp.
WiseStamp is a firefox add-on using which, you can easily create HTML signatures for any mail program including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, etc. Image below is a sample of my Email signature, similarly, if you too want, you can create one such signature, easily using WiseStamp.
Installing & Using WiseStamp
As this is a Firefox add-on, you can use it only if you have firefox installed on your PC. If you have not yet installed firefox then its available for download here.
Recently I was updated from the Gmail blog about some tweaks introduced for attaching files in Gmail. Here are the two new features introduced:
Support for attaching multiple files.
Status bar to show progress of upload.
1. Using the multiple file attachment feature, you can attach as many files while composing mails in Gmail. It means you need not use the option of ‘Attach another file’ for attaching multiple files from a single directory. This is nothing but the multi select option that we normally use while performing tasks locally. Just press ‘Ctrl’ key (Cmd in case of OS X) and select as many files, of course the total file size should not exceed Gmail’s attachment limit.
2. Unlike other upload services or other mail services, earlier, Gmail did not show up status of how much part of the file has been uploaded, but today, along with multiple file selection service, Gmail has added support to show the status of uploaded file.
Personally, the previous feature is not much useful for me, but the later one (status bars) is really a good feature, because it will keep you updated if you are uploading a big file, say 8 or 10 MB.
From last few hours Gmail has been down here. First I thought, its unlucky me as coincidentally my internet connection is experiencing some problems since last night. But Twitter(and this) confirmed that I am not alone!
Still, as a (G)mail addict, I am waiting desperately for Gmail to come back, as I need to send some important mails.
Now coming back to Gmail.com, it is showing “502 Server Error“. Optimistically, I checked m.gmail.com (Gmail’s mobile version) and also tried accessing Gmail.com via proxies. But no luck! 🙁
Then I tried hitting mail.rtcamp.com (Gmail in Google Apps) and it worked like charm! So if you are Google Apps user accessing your domain’s mails from Gmail.com, please don’t wait it to come back. You can directly go to mail domain of your Google Apps package and enjoy the service from there! 🙂
I haven’t checked Gmail’s status via POP and IMAP interface. Is there anyone who can comment on Gmail availability via POP and IMAP right now?
Offline Gmail for iPhone! How does it sounds? Cool.. right? Yes, if you are a iPhone user, then this feature (Offline Gmail) may soon be rolled out for you if the talk with Google engineer turns out to be true. This guy named Vic Gundotra heading the engineering team at Google demonstrated offline Gmail for iPhone at the World Mobile Congress (WMC).
If you are a Google loyalist and follow their activities, you must be aware of the fact that recently they launched Offline Gmail for PC users and there were really good review of this feature that worked using Google gears. But for iPhone, report says, offline Gmail will work using HTML5’s AppCache and Database standards.
As of now reports are saying that Gundotra had stated that this was just a "technical concept" right now that essentially depends on HTML5’s AppCache and Database standards, that would have the application as well as all the user data on the handset.
Though, there is no official release about support for Offline Gmail for iPhone users, but the above report points that this feature will surely be rolled out for iPhone users in the days to come. 🙂
Since the launch of Gmail Themes, there were rumors that Google may soon come up with features to customize the themes in Gmail and Orkut as per users choice as in iGoogle. Though, this time customizable themes option is not released neither for Gmail nor for Orkut, but using this new new feature we are talking about, you can color your inbox as per your choice. 🙂
Those you are excited to know more about this feature can have a look on the screenshot below, and imagine how your inbox would look after you customize its colors.
You can edit your Gmail inbox colors by clicking Settings-> Themes-> Choose your own colors
The above edited colors of my inbox may not look good and attractive to you as am not good with color combinations, still I feel this is a good feature and Gmail users looking out for add-on will love to use this feature. So if you were bored with the existing theme directory of Gmail then give this feature a try, its really worth giving a try. 🙂
An exciting new feature has been added to Gmail Labs is “Location in Signature”. Just enable this lab feature and Gmail will automatically append your current location (the city and the country name) to your Gmail signature, like this:
(Marco Bonechi is the developer of this new feature)
Note that this feature uses public IP address to identify your current location, so it may be inaccurate sometimes or may slightly vary.
Here is the step by step procedure to turn on this feature-
Log in your Gmail inbox.
Go to Settings -> Labs and scroll down a bit to locate the “Location in Signature” feature.
Check the Enable radio button to enable this feature and click on save changes.
Now go to Settings -> General and go to the signature settings. Check Append your location to the signature.
That’s it. Now your signature will always contain your current location. As this feature uses your IP address, guess you must have understood how exactly this feature works. It tracks the location of your IP and appends the same location as your “location signature” and hence, as said earlier, your location may vary slightly. 😉
______________________________________________________________________________________ [Editor Note: This is the first post by guest blogger Mayur Somani, who blogs at HackTrix about softwares and tech stuff. If you too like to write for Devils Workshop, please check this. Details about our revenue sharing programs are here.]
