LiVe LiFe To The FuLLThe world is moving ! Don’t stay behind…

Gmail has been slowly but surely rolling out cool new features ever since they started Gmail Labs. If you haven’t taken advantage of the fruits of Labs, here’s a look at 10 Labs features you should enable.

Offline Gmail

Probably the most significant feature you can get out of Labs, Offline Gmail takes advantage of Google Gears to turn Gmail into an offline email client. You can search most of your messages, draft new messages, and do pretty much everything you can do with Gmail while you’re connected to the internet. Gmail automatically detects whether you’re connected or not to keep your offline and online Gmail in sync. (Read more)

Multiple Inboxes

Got a widescreen monitor and a lot of filters and labels you want to keep an eye on? When enabled, Multiple Inboxes displays up to eight different searches or labels next to your inbox for a king-sized dashboard of your email activity. (Read more)

Tasks

Google has taken a lot of guff for not creating a to-do list app to round out their productivity suite of apps. Tasks may not be a full-fledged app (yet), but it’s a great start. You can even turn an email into a task with a simple Shift+t keyboard shortcut. Once set up, you can add tasks to your Firefox sidebar and access it from your cell phone and iGoogle. (Read more)

Go to label

Gmail has all kinds of great keyboard shortcuts, including combo keys that take you to your inbox (’g’ then ‘i’), starred mail (’g’ then ’s’), and more. With Go to label enabled, you can quickly navigate between labels from your keyboard in a similar manner. Simply type ‘g’ (Go), ‘l’ (Label), and then start typing the name of the label you want to go to. Go to label will autocomplete the label, so chances are you’ll be there in a couple of keystrokes. Go to label also works with the next Labs feature, Quick Links.

Quick Links

Quick Links adds a new sidebar to Gmail just below your labels. When enabled, Quick Links can be used to bookmark anything in Gmail, from a common search to a specific email. It’s an incredible way to set up quick access to common searches without setting up a filter and label.

Superstars

By default, Gmail ships with one yellow star to help you better keep track of and call out important emails. With Superstars enabled, you’ve got a whopping 12 different icons to choose from. You can even search for different superstar types specifically—especially handy if you want to set up some Quick Links with your Superstars!

Canned Responses

Do a lot of repetitive typing, do you? With Canned Responses, you can set up canned replies so you can quickly and easily fire off that same old reply without succumbing to the pains of RSI. Your hands will thank you. (If you’re really serious about canned responses, check out Texter [Windows], TextExpander [Mac], or Snippits [Linux]).

Custom Keyboard Shortcuts

Love keyboard shortcuts but never quite got the hang of the layout of Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts? With Custom Keyboard Shortcuts enabled, you can customize any of Gmail’s default shortcuts to your liking. Handy!

Forgotten Attachment Detector

Save yourself the embarrassment of the second whoops-I-forgot! email with the Forgotten Attachment Detector. It scans your email to determine whether or not you had meant to attach a file and alerts you if an attachment is missing.

Pictures in Chat

The Pictures in Chat feature does exactly what it sounds like: adds user icons to your Gmail Chat window. This one won’t boost your productivity all that much, but it’s a nice little tweak.

Today Gmail Labs released a new feature that bridges the gap between desktop and web-based applications like never before: Offline Gmail. You can now access your Gmail from your browser any time, whether or not you’re online.Video after the break …
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Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension Integrated Gmail creates collapsible groups in your Gmail account that integrate all of your favorite Google apps directly inside Gmail. That includes access to Google Reader, Calendar, Notebook, Maps, Groups, and Picasa. As if that wasn’t already good enough, Integrated Gmail can also embed custom pages and Google Gadgets. Granted, Google has started integrating gadgets into the Gmail sidebar if that’s up your alley, but if you want full access to different apps without leaving the comfort of Gmail, the Integrated Gmail extension does exactly that. Keep reading for a closer look at Integrated Gmail in action.

Google Calendar in Gmail

Google Reader in Gmail

Lifehacker in Gmail

As you can see, you can even embed a favorite site within Gmail. Not bad, eh?

Google Maps in Gmail, Integrated Gmail Settings

Integrated Gmail is currently an experimental download at the Firefox add-ons site, which means it may have some bugs, and you’ll need to register at Mozilla’s site to install it. While you’re getting experimental, check out a few other experimental extensions we love.

When friends push friends onto Gmail, it usually involves talking up the seemingly limitless storage space, the fast-moving interface, or its inter-connectedness with other Google applications, like Calendar. Those features are all fine and good, but Gmail does a lot of helpful things that some users never get to dig into. From one short web address, you can video chat Skype-style with contacts, ensure you didn’t leave yourself logged in elsewhere, help mom gradually migrate from her old dial-up-era email address, and pluck a single message out of tens of thousands. Let’s dig in and take a look at Gmail’s less-touted features for power users.

10. Change Gmail’s look entirely with themes.

Adam did the yeoman’s work of compiling screenshots and thumbnails of Gmail’s new Themes, accessible through a Settings tab, and one can see that they’re more than just a font switch and background image. Gmail’s themes cover a nice range of aesthetic choices, geekiness, cute-overload, elegant color tweaks, and, for those who put a lot of time in on the screen, dark-themed schemes. If you haven’t checked them out yet, they’re certainly worth a look, if only to give your eyes a rest from all the variants of light blue.

9. Launch video and audio chats, no Skype required.

It’s Windows-only at this point, and still requires a little browser plug-in, but it’s surprising how little fanfare Gmail’s native video chat application has received. It’s comparable quality to most software-based solutions, it’s got a full-screen mode, and, well, if the person’s not all that intriguing, you can minimize them and get back to your email.

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8. Back up your email from any system.

Just because Google wants you to put your digital life in the cloud doesn’t mean you can’t have your own copy of your own messages and attachments. There are lots of ways to get your entire Gmail dump onto your desktop. We’re currently into Gmail Backup, which is graphical for Windows and command line for Linux and Mac OS X. You can also grab it with the command-line-based Fetchmail, grab them via POP with Thunderbird, or use the web-based StashMyMail for 99 cents, if you don’t mind the third-party-ness of it. To back up another email account using Gmail’s generous storage space, you can always BCC: your outgoing messages to a Gmail account to make sure you’ve always got an online searchable copy of your mail.

7. See all the places where you’re signed in, and remotely sign out.

Friends’ and significant others’ computers, work, public terminals—people sign into Gmail from all kinds of places, and don’t always remember to hit that privacy-ensuring “Sign Out” in the upper-right corner. At the very bottom of any Gmail inbox, though, is a text line showing where else the account is open, along with a list of sign-in times and IP addresses and a button that signs you out of everything but the browser you’re in right then. No need to worry, then, that your friends’ willpower will ever be tested by discovering you’re still signed in on their system.

6. Serve as a central, synchronized, smarter contact list.

Used to be that Gmail put everyone you sent five emails to went into your contacts, but they’ve wised up and created two lists: Your true contacts, and those oft-mailed but not well-known folks into “Suggested” contacts. That makes Google a much nicer, cleaner place to sync your computers and devices from. Mac users can pull Google Contacts into their Address Book with or without an iPhone, Blackberry owners can hook up too, and fans of Thunderbird have got their own tool as well. Oh, and the Google-centric Android platform does it too, of course.

5. Consolidate all your email accounts.

Gmail eliminates the need to ever have to send one of those very late, apologetic “Don’t check this email often” replies from your ancient accounts. Gina’s explained how straightforward it is to consolidate multiple email addresses into Gmail, with full importing of messages from any POP or IMAP-compliant account (almost all of them are) and the ability to keep sending emails from your old address, eliminating the need for mass pleas to update address books.

4. Help friends find their own Gmail messages or bookmark your own.

“You honestly do not have my email explaining how to take care of my dogs and disable the alarm system? Okay, no, it’s no big thing, Steve. Hit this link, it should take you to the right message: http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/buster+alarm+code+Pedigree” That kind of universal search link is pretty helpful, but the addresses of any email you open in Gmail are also permalinks for the account owner, meaning you can create lists of emails you need to get back to, bookmark an important thread in your browser favorites, and save them for any other purpose or list.

3. Keep your Gmail account(s) on your desktop.

More than one of the Lifehacker editors had gotten used to keeping Gmail and Lifehacker’s Google Apps email open in two browser tabs, clicking over when a new message hit the title bar. With the just-launched Google Desktop Gadget, though, all the basic actions of email—read, star, label, delete, respond—can fit into a corner of your desktop. If you’re good with Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts, the gadget works with those, too, and can be opened in multiple instances for different accounts. Pretty neat stuff, but if it’s not worth installing the whole Google Desktop suite for, check out the other ways our readers get their Gmail notifications.

2. Give you total search power.

It’s easy to forget that the company providing Gmail is, by and large, a search specialist, and has given its webmail app some serious search, filter, and organization tools. Don’t waste time scrolling through page after page of your mom’s email—find that one email she sent a few months back, with the attached JPEG file and mentioning that cat, Mr. Nibbles or Snibbles or whatnot–from:Stacey after:2008/09/01 has:attachment (nibbles OR snibbles). You can start at learning the basic operators, then take Adam’s tips on building advanced filters and persistent searches

1. Do much, much more with Gmail Labs experimental features.

It started out as a modest set of tweaks and small Oh Neat items, but Gmail’s Labs section has become a powerhouse of email features. From Labs’ increasingly-long list of tools, you can set up canned responses for standard replies, stop yourself from forgetting attachments, get your Google Calendar agenda and Remember the Milk tasks, get at all your various attachment types with Quick Links, and many, many more tweaks. Labs isn’t particularly hidden away or obscure, but if you haven’t taken the time to scroll down the list of options, you’re almost certainly missing out on something that makes your webmail home a bit more comfortable.

Those are our picks for ten tricks that Gmail pulls off without a lot of praise, but everyone uses their webmail differently. Let’s hear your own hidden (or obvious) Gmail tricks and glad-hands in the comments.