Your inbox is a mess — like a tornado hit it, if tornadoes could strike email. It doesn't have to be that way.
We've covered how to deal with all the email you're bombarded with and how to send email like a pro. Now let's think outside the (in)box.
Where Gmail Labs really starts to flex its muscle is in organizing your inbox:
Preview Pane — For people with larger monitors this makes email even more effortless. Mimicking traditional desktop email clients, half of your inbox is allocated to displaying a selected email and the other half is your inbox. This saves you a lot of clicks and attention switching over the course of the day. Plus, once enabled, it’s easy to turn off and on with a single click from the home screen. As someone who has a large monitor at work and a small monitor at home, this fast switching between Preview Pane mode and traditional inbox is very much appreciated.
Authentication Icon For Verified Senders — Years ago I got phished by a spammer pretending to be Paypal and knew immediately after it happened that I’d made a mistake. This Gmail Lab adds a little key icon to eBay and Paypal emails so you know you can trust those emails since eBay and Paypal are the senders spammers are most often trying to spoof.
Google Docs Previews In Mail — Read through full documents from inside your email. The fewer new windows I have to open, the better.
Video Chat Enhancements — If you video chat a lot you’ll appreciate the higher definition video quality this feature offers as well as early access to updates Google makes to the video chat interface.
Unread Message Icon — Adds the number of unread messages you have to the Gmail favicon (little envelope icon in your browser tab). As someone who regularly has 30+ tabs open, this handful of pixels is the only way I know whether I have new emails.
Mark As Read Button — “Tired of spending all that effort to click on the more actions menu every time you want to mark messages as read without reading them?” Yes, yes I do, snarky Google employee Mark K. Since I leave everything in my inbox, having a way to easily mark things as read is as important to me as easy archiving is to someone who empties their inbox.
