Back in 2009, Google launched the automatic message translation tool in Gmail Labs, which enabled you to translate emails that are in foreign language into a desired language that you understand. The auto translation of messages became immensely popular and successful, and thus Google decided to graduate it from Gmail Labs and move into the real world. That is, the feature will now be enabled by default to all users.

Google Translate has always been a very friendly and immensely useful tool. Incorporating the same feature in Gmail is a good move from Google, as many times we do receive email messages that are not in a language we understand.

Unlike the earlier days, we would not be required to copy the text and translate it using either Google Translate or a different translation engine. With the integrated translation, it’s not only easy to translate messages, but also save your time.

This is how the feature works in action -

All you need to do is click on “Translate message” to translate the message in your desired language.

You can as well choose to permanently translate a particular language to your desired language by clicking on “Always translate: [language]” option on the top-right of the message. You can always disable the feature if you’re a bi-lingual and don’t need translations for a language. All you need to do is click on “Turn off for: [language].”

If you have accidentally turned off the message translation feature for a particular language, or don’t see the Translate message header on a message, click on the down arrow next to Reply at the top-right of the message pane and select the Translate message option in the drop-down.

Also Read: Translate Google+ into More Than 50 Languages

In addition to this, Google has also graduated the Smart Mute and Title Tweaks feature from the Gmail Labs. The smart Mute feature is basically used to mute noisy email thread and makes sure that it stays out of your inbox. Click here to know more about muting email threads.

The Title Tweaks feature changes the title in your browser’s tab to tell you that you have new messages. The tab now reads “Inbox (20) – user@example.com – Gmail” instead of “Gmail – Inbox (20) – user@example.com.”

Along with the new features, the Gmail team has retired some older and less popular Lab features in the next few days. Those features include – “Old Snakey, Mail Goggles, Mouse Gestures, Hide Unread Counts, Move Icon Column, Inbox Preview, Custom Date Formats and SMS in Chat gadget. Please note that the SMS in Chat lab is not being retired, just the gadget associated with it.”

Gmail is considered to be one of the best, if not the best email client on the Web. One of the reasons Gmail became so popular over the years, is due to Google’s strategy to let integrated apps and other services work within it. Gmail is not only integrated with Google services like Docs, Calendar, Chat, Tasks, Search but also with other 3rd party apps that can boost your productivity and make your life easier with daily tasks. In other words Gmail today is not only used is an email client but as a massive Web-platform that can be helpful for managing a lot of other tasks that we would otherwise need several applications to do.

Over the years I’ve been trying to take advantage of Gmail features and apps in order to make my life easier, and I’m still discovering new benefits every day. I’m not going to write about the basic and obvious Gmail advantages and features, but I’m going to describe you 4 apps that I use daily.

1. Boomerang for Gmail

This is an already popular app, reaching 1 million downloads, and lets you do 2 simple things:

a. Schedule your emails. When composing an email, you have the option to schedule your email in order to be sent the day after or a week after or at any date/time of your preference. This is an amazing feature for people like me who are working late or on weekends and don’t want to show the correct date of the emails to their clients. For example, let’s say you need to answer to 10 emails until Monday morning and its Sunday night. There is no way to write these emails within one hour on Monday but neither you would like these emails to be send on Sunday at 22:00. With Boomerang you can start replying to all of your emails on Sunday night, scheduling them to be send on Monday at 9:30 morning which is a normal working hour.

b. Create reminders for emails. Using Boomerang you can assign a reminder to any email at any given time and date. That has several uses, for example you got an email from your partner with your “Website’s progress” monthly report. You might not want to deal with this issue now because you are busy with other stuff, but you want to be reminded to check it in 2 weeks. So you set up a reminder with Boomerang inside the message. You can also use this function for every email you send and which you are expecting a reply. Thus, if you do not receive a reply from a specific email within 2 weeks, Boomerang will remind you about that.

What so cool about it?
It’s cool because you can send emails at 23:00 and let them look like you send them next day morning. It’s also cool because it sends you reminders for important emails you assigned it.

Cost: Limited version Free. $4.99/month for paid unlimited version.

2. Rapportive

Rapportive is a Gmail app that visually is seen at the right column of your Gmail. This app will search the Web and especially Social Networks like Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter, every time you receive an email from someone and will display to you the public information associated with the owner of that email account.  More precisely will look for the owner’s name, photo in Linkedin, work position, Twitter and Facebook and will even display the latest tweets of the person. That can be a great feature for a lot of people that often receive emails from strangers, helping them get useful information.

What’s so cool about it?
You see the faces and important information of unknown people that send you emails.

Cost: Free

3. Yesware

I have discovered Yesware a few weeks ago and I’m really impressed wih it. This app is dedicated to Salespeople and managers, and it can help you track emaila, create templates, organize your sales activity, create reports and even integrate it with few of the most famous CRM systems in the market. Personally, I use only the tracking system and templates. The ability to track your emails will give you the ability to know if and when an email you have sent was opened by the other person. A lot of times we send emails knowing that the email was sent but not knowing if the person on the other site has opened it. With Yesware you will know this instantly. The template feature will also help you maintain standard format emails when replying to similar emails, letting you to change only variable words like the name, price, etc. I believe this app has a lot to offer, and everyone can find different ways using it

What’s so cool about it?
People will not be able lie to you about reading your email or not. With Yesware you know instantly that your email was opened and read.

Cost: Limited version Free. $4.99 for Unlimited use

4. Wisestamp

Wisestamp might not be the most useful app for Gmail, but it will certainly provide you the ability to have the coolest signature. WiseStamp is an app that lets you create a nice looking and powerful signature for your Gmail. By powerful we mean that you have a bunch of choices and apps that you can include inside your signature, creating a powerful and dynamic content signature. A few of the things you can include in your signature with Wisestamp are:
- Social Media. Provide link to your social media presence directly from your signature. (Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest)
- Facebook page. Show the activities of your Facebook page, your status and your updates
- Rss feeds. Automatically display feeds from your Blog inside your signature
- Create VCard Barcode
- Provide links and integrations with Charity and Causes organizations like WWF, Global Giving and more.
- Show dynamic content from other websites like Wikipedia, Quora, Today in History, and Random quotes
- Share your presentations from Slideshare
- Create other social bookmark and social activities

There are a lot of more various apps you can include in your signature using Wisestamp, just visit the App Gallery and you will be amazed.

What’s so cool about it?
You will have a really cool signature and you can drive traffic to your social media accounts, blog or website from your signature

Cost: Limited Version Free. $36/year Pro account

If productivity is important in your life, or if Gmail is the most used application of your day, then you should definitely try the above apps. I’m not a huge fan of apps, since I always look for simplicity and performance in the tools that I use. But if your daily needs and tasks go beyond sending an email, then these apps will definitely make a difference in your productivity and performance.

=== Author Bio ====
Pantelis Vladimirou is the co-founder of Webarts Limited, a creative Digital agency, providing Cyprus SEO, Web Design, Social Media and other Internet Marketing services

Gmail has a nifty little feature called “Undo Send” in Gmail Labs which allows you to unsend emails after you have sent them. You could unsend emails for up to 5 seconds until now, as Gmail delayed the emails for 5 seconds before it actually sent them. This gave Gmail an easy way to handle the huge email traffic flowing through its servers and also provided a nice feature to its users. It has helped me a lot of times by allowing me to unsend my emails and correct them in case there were any mistakes.

Google now allows you to dial the delay duration up to 30 seconds. You can change the “Send Cancellation Period” to 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds by visiting Gmail > Settings > General > Undo Send.

Gmail has introduced a new feature in Gmail Labs which allows users to search for data in your linked Google Docs and Google Sites account from within Gmail.

The "Apps Search" lab feature extends search with Google Docs and Sites results. It will find the most relevant docs and sites and show them below the Gmail search results. The feature is definitely interesting and will allow users to quickly find documents and pages from the other services.

However, the feature does not seem to be working fully right now as my searches did not return results from my Google Docs account. This might be because Gmail might take some time to index all the files in the Google Docs and Sites account.

To enable the feature go to your Google Labs tab in Settings (click here) and scroll down till you see a header for "Available Labs". Under this header enable the "Apps Search" feature and save your settings.

The next time you use Gmail to search for something, you will also be show results from your Google Docs and Google Sites account.

(h/t @steverubel via @Orli)

Gmail allows users to setup external POP3 accounts in their Gmail accounts, however, the mail fetching does not happen instantly. Gmail schedules email download from POP3 at specific intervals.

However, you can now refresh your POP3 account and fetch email on demand using a new Gmail Labs feature called Refresh POP accounts. To enable this feature, head over to Settings -> Labs and enable the "Refresh POP accounts" feature.

Once you do that, you will see a new option to Refresh your emails, using this link you can refresh both your Gmail Inbox and also fetch emails from your POP accounts.

Gmail has always been widely under attack, however, most of the times user’s account are compromised because of phishing, rather than because of the lack of security @Gmail.

HTTPS or HTTP_Secure, is a secure way of transmitting data to and fro on the web. Unlike HTTP, HTTPS data is encrypted before a transfer occurs. This makes data transfered through HTTPS hard to snoop on, and allows users a safer way to browse the web.

Gmail did have an option for users to use HTTPS as default, through a Gmail Labs feature. Today, Google graduated the feature out of labs. This means that all Gmail users will now automatically start using HTTPS by default. Users have an option to disable HTTPS by default by visiting “Settings -> Labs” and choosing “Don’t always use https”

However, HTTPS alone cannot save you from being hacked. There are several other ways in which you can protect your online accounts. The first rule is, NEVER click on links in emails sent by strangers. The second rule is, NEVER download content that are sent by strangers.

You can also make use of a Gmail Labs feature called Anti-Phishing Key, which allows you to distinguish between legitimate and spam email. However, this feature has a limited scope and only supports eBay and PayPal right now.

If your Gmail account is hacked, you might want to read what steps you should perform in order to check the safety of your Gmail Account

Gmail has introduced a new feature in Gmail Labs which will allow you to send attachments when you are in offline mode. Offline mode allows users to download emails and read them in Offline mode in a web browser, the emails are stored locally by Google Gears.

Earlier, Gmail only allowed users to compose email while they were in offline mode, and sent it whenever they were connected to the internet. However, they have now also enabled uploading attachments while in offline mode.

What this means is that, you can now quickly download all the photos you took on your trip and attach it while you are on the plane. The email and attachments will be instantly sent out when you have access to an internet connection, saving you both time and efforts and giving you something interesting to do on the plane.

To make use of this feature go to Gmail -> Settings, and enable Offline Gmail.

Gmail has announced a new feature in Gmail Labs which will offer email and name suggestions, while adding recipients to an email. This feature will definitely come in handy, while using auto-completion for typing out email addresses.

Why is this Feature useful?

I have 7 contacts with the name Markin my email account, all of them have different email addresses. Now say, I want to send an email to Mark no 3, however instead of that, by mistake I use Mark no 2′s email address.

The new feature introduced by Gmail will display suggestions in the form of Did you mean, which is also shown in Google Search for mistyped words.

This will definitely save you a lot of embarrassment, which may occur due to you sending out an email to the wrong person.

How Does it Work?

Gmail will basically study your habits and suggest you the alternatives based on the past emails you have sent to a group of people.

If you normally email Bob Smith together with Tim and Angela, but this time you added Bob Jones instead, we’ll warn you that it might be a mistake. Note that this only works if you’re emailing more than two people at once

The new feature is available under Settings -> Labs – Don’t forget Bob. Once you activate this feature, you will start seeing suggestions, when you compose an email with 2 or more recipients.

New in Labs: Got the Wrong Bob? [Official Gmail Blog]

Illustration via Geek and Poke

Google has been coming up with several features, however many of them are usually in the Labs, where they go through rigorous testing before they some of them finally graduate to become stable products.

Once such interesting product in Gmail Labs was Google Tasks which allowed you to quickly take notes or add your emails to notes.

Don’t Miss: Useful Gmail Gadgets | Social Networking Gadgets for Gmail

Over a period of time Google Tasks was integrated into Google Calendar and you also had the option to access Google tasks from your desktop, it was getting more and more useful over a period of time.

The Gmail team has finally graduated this feature out of labs, however surprisingly this was the shortest period we have seen a feature graduate out of labs, which would mean that is more stable and widely used.

Starting today you will see a link for tasks under the contacts link in Gmail, the feature no longer requires users to enable it in Gmail Labs.

If you have not yet been using this, we definitely recommend you give it a try.

Tasks graduates from Gmail Labs [Official Gmail Blog]

Phishing attacks are not uncommon and many people are fooled to believe that someone is sending you a genuine email, though Gmail‘s spam filters are excellent, there may be times when you want to confirm if a email is genuine and not a phishing attempt.

Gmail Labs has rolled out a new feature that will add a Anti-Phishing key to all genuine emails from popular sites like eBay and PayPal.

To turn on this feature go to Settings > Labs and look for Authentication icon for verified senders and enable it.

Once you have enabled this feature, you will see a key next to the vendor from address whenever the email is genuine.

We highly recommend that you turn on this labs feature in Gmail, this will definitely save you a lot of hassles and keep you safe from phishing attacks.

This feature is only limited to emails from PayPal & eBay, however it will be expanded to include more vendors in the future.

New in Labs: The super-trustworthy, anti-phishing key [Official Gmail Blog]