Tag: Gmail

Gmail Introduces Duplicate Contact Cleaner for Merging Contacts

Quite sometime back we had told you how to remove duplicate contacts in Windows Live Hotmail and removing duplicate contacts in Yahoo Mail, back then did not have the ability to remove duplicate contacts.

However, there was an announcement at the Gmail Blog today, where they introduced a new feature to delete duplicate contacts from your Gmail contacts list.

Removing Duplicate Contacts in Gmail

To remove duplicate contacts from Gmail, follow the steps given below.

Step 1: Login to Gmail and click on the contacts link in the sidebar. You can also load the standalone Gmail contacts page.

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Step 2: Click on the Find duplicate buttons in the right hand pane.

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Step 3: Once you click on the button, Gmail will scan your contacts for duplicates and display it to you. You can choose the contacts and decide to merge them into a single one, thus cleaning up the duplicate contacts from your Gmail account.

This can come in pretty handy if you use your Gmail contacts as the base contacts and sync it with Outlook or your mobile phone.

Gmail Air Skin for Google Chrome

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Remember the Air Skin for Firefox? Well it is now available for to as an . I tried it out on Chrome and it looks pretty good. If you are confused about using extensions in Chrome, read up our earlier post on Google Chrome Extensions vs Firefox add-ons: Head to Head comparison.

Download Google Air Skin for Chrome

Send Christmas Cards as Snail Mail Using Gmail

users can spread some love by sending out real cards to anyone in the United States for a limited time.

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To send out Christmas cards using snail mail, visit the Gmail Holiday Card page and enter the details and address of the recipient.

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Currently Gmail will be sending out only limited number of cards, and as far as we can tell, it is limited to one per email address, but you can try to send out more. Don’t forget to say thanks to Santa, err the Gmail Elf for sending out your free Christmas card.

If you are not able to send out a Christmas card using snail mail, you can always checkout our list of free website to send out Christmas greetings or create your own personalized Christmas cards using a excellent .

Android/iPhone Gets New Gmail and Google Mobile Web Apps

Google has come up with a new design for Gmail, Google Latitude, Google Calendar, or Gmail Tasks for Android and iPhone users. The new look consists of darker header and buttons to distinguish themselves from the other elements. Also all the buttons are now bit larger, to make button tapping easier for the users.

 

Gmail-for-iPhone

The new design does not bring any exceptional changes but the darker menu bar on the top with spacious buttons is a welcome change for users with fat fingers. Do let us know what you think of the new UI.

Try out the following services from google:

gmail.com for Gmail,

google.com/calendar for Google Calendar,

google.com/latitude for Google Latitude and

gmail.com/tasks for Gmail Tasks.

Unlock Locked Google/Gmail Accounts

Have you ever come across scenarios when you try to login to your Google or account and find out that your account is locked?

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In many cases, there is not much you can do. You might have to wait between 1-24 hours to get your account working again. Thanks to Technospot.net, we came across an URL which could possibly unlock locked Google/Gmail accounts.

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The unlock page contains a email and password field and a captcha, however, there is not indication whether this will actually unlock locked accounts. Nevertheless, if your account has been locked, you might want to try out this page to see if it actually unlocks your account. If you are interested in finding out the reasons on why Google blocks accounts, you might want to visit this Google help page.

P.S. If you are able to unlock your locked Gmail/Google accounts using the URL, please leave a comment on this page so that others can benefit from it.

Unlock Gmail/Google Accounts

Gmail Enables Attachments in Offline Mode

has introduced a new feature in 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.

Animated Gmail Notifier for Your Desktop

providers users with many ways to get notifications about new emails, you can choose to use a the Gmail notifier for or even choose to use Google Talk for desktops.

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However, do you want to get notified about emails through a fancy animation? If yes, the B2 Gmail Notifier is your best bet. B2 Gmail Notifier is a based cross-platform software, which will show you animated notifications whenever you receive a new email in Gmail.

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The application also allows you to choose from several pre-defined animations, while providing you with an option to download and install new ones.

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Considering it is a animated application, we put it through a series of tests. We saw that it uses moderate amount of RAM (38 MB), however, whenever there is a new notification, the CPU usage jumps considerably.

Techie Buzz Verdict

This application is not something that has not been done before. However, it is innovative in the sense in which it displays the new email notifications. Other than that, we would like to see support for multiple Gmail accounts in the app.

Looking at the system usage trends, we saw that the app tends to jump up in CPU usage whenever animations are displayed, this though does not hinder in your other activities, but system with low RAM may tend to hang up at times.

Download this app, if you love animations and want to keep a check on your emails.

Techie Buzz Ratings: 2.5/5 (Good)

Download B2 Gmail Notifier

Synchronize Google/Gmail Contacts With Outlook

I use both and on a day to day basis, making use of email, contacts and calendar to manage my day to day life. However, managing multiple calendar entries and contacts can be quite a hassle.

I use a software called Google Calendar Sync to keep Outlook and Google Calendar in sync, however I have been looking for find a suitable synchronization tool for contacts.

google_outlook_contacts_sync

Google Contacts Outlook Synchronizer is a handy that synchronizes the contacts between Outlook and your regular Gmail account. This app also supports contact synchronization for Google Apps account.

Once you install the software, choose the direction in which the synchronization should happen. You might want to choose a higher Synchronization interval, as you hardly keep editing contacts every 5 minutes, 6 to 12 hours interval should be good enough.

Download Google Contacts Outlook Synchronizer

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Gmail Introduces “Did you mean?” Email/Name Suggestions

has announced a new feature in 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.

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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.

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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

Yahoo Turns Xoopit Off for Gmail Users

Remember sometime back we told you about how had acquired Xoopit a hugely popular photo indexing service and raised questions about what would happen to users who use the software?

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Turns out that the nightmare has finally come true. In a very controversial decision, Yahoo has announced that they will be disabling the Xoopit service for Gmail users.

Xoopit teamed up with Yahoo! in July 2009. We are excited to be making the world’s best email platform a fantastic place to see and share photos, and decided that the best way to make that happen is to focus on our effort on Yahoo! Mail. We’re sad to say goodbye to our users on Gmail but we know that we will not be able to keep investing in our Xoopit for Gmail product, and don’t want you to end up with a lousy experience.

I am not sure how many people would be surprised with this decision as the writing was already on the wall when Yahoo bought Xoopit. Your Gmail data will not be deleted, however the data stored on Xoopit servers will be inaccessible starting November 13, 2009. All you data will be permanently removed by February 11, 2009.

I personally never used Xoopit in Gmail, but the Yahoo mail application is pretty good. Hopefully, we will see a bright Google engineer come up with a feature that does something similar. It would really be interesting to see if that ever happens in near future.

What is your take on this? Have you been using Xoopit with your Gmail account? Do let us know through your comments.

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