By Pascal Oparada
Wednesday, April 25, 2018, Google launched the biggest revamp of Gmail in years. The tech giant is bringing to the Gmail service many of the features it trialed in inbox for Gmail and adding new features, too.
Those news features, which was leaked early this month, shows that the company is introducing a refreshed design for the service, though not entirely different for existing one.
The new Gmail comes with a wide range of new features. The first you would notice is the ability to take actions on emails right from the inbox itself. When you hover over an email without clicking into it, you will now see icons to archive and delete a message, as well as mark as read. There is also a link to the new snooze features there.
Snoozing an email means Gmail gives you the option to resurface it later in the day, tomorrow, later in the week, on the weekend or next week, if you like a clean inbox, that is a good way to keep your inbox uncluttered and the important email you want to treat will pop back up into your queue. The snooze feature is only available from the inbox.
There is also a new nudging feature which Google uses its AI tools to figure out that a message is probably important to you and resurfaces it to remind you to follow or reply.
There is also a new ‘confidential mode’. The idea is when you write an email, you can select for how long the recipient will be able to read the email. Recipients will not be able to forward, copy or paste, download or print the content. In the event of a hack of your email account, the email with confidential mode would disappear automatically.
There is also the ‘authentication mode’ where the recipient will have to receive an SMS message with a Google-generated passcode to read the email.
Other new features in Gmail include high-priority notifications, which will only notify you of a new email if Google deems it to be really, really important, and unsubscribe suggestions, which nudges you to unsubscribe when it looks like you stopped reading messages from a given newsletter, TechCrunch reported.
There is also the offline mode. You can store up to 90 days of emails and search through them, for instance. The new capability will launch in the coming weeks.
The many standard Gmail features are intact. You can still sort and filter emails into different folders/categories. If you like Google automatic filters, then you can use those too.
The new design is now rolling out to regular Gmail users. As usual, you’ll be able to switch back and forth at first. Then, at some point in the future, Google will switch all users to the new design. For business users, the G Suite admin will have to enable these new features by enrolling in the G Suite Early Adopter Programme, TechCrunch reports.
