San Francisco — Google is consistently introducing smart new features to its Gmail users’ emailing pleasure. Google just recently announced a series of changes to Gmail’s labels, a graceful feature designed to allow people categorize and organize their e-mail messages in lieu of folders, which the company has resisted providing in its webmail service.
Gmail, which is still technically in Beta, and hardly few months back Gmail added some keyboard shortcuts and some new buttons to make labeling simpler, instead of folders to sort its mail, allowing the same email to be linked to more than one folder. Today, Gmail is adding even more to their labeling arsenal.
New labels location released overnight:
Label location moved: With the upgrade to Gmail users will notice that their labels now have a new home. The labels have now been moved to above the chat list. So, instead of your labels having their own section, now they have been grouped with your Inbox, Drafts, Chats and other “default” labels.
The concept of labeling is not fading away, said Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager. “We wanted to add some functionality that would make labels more useful for people used to folders,” he said in explaining some of the changes.
New label hiding features:
If you are more avid about the labels in Gmail, but find you are constantly getting lost in a sea of label goodness, this might just be your new favorite feature. Gmail now only displays you the labels you use the most, and automatically conceals the rest. And for those who have large list of labels in use, clicking on the “more” button will bring up the hidden labels without going to a different Web page, and the number of labels shown in the default view can be set by the user.
Gmail adds drag and drop capabilities: For enthusiastic users of Outlook and many any other mail client — dragging and dropping emails into folders is a great way to keep organized. With Gmail offering additional bonus, an important addition is the ability to drag and drop messages using the mouse “into” labels.
With the new changes to the labels within Gmail, Google will discard the option to put labels in the right-hand side of the interface, a functionality that never matured out of its experimental Labs phase and that the company views as unnecessary now.
“This is the first Labs feature we are terminating. Now that labels are not in their own little box and take up much less space, moving them around the screen does not seem as important. We realize quite a few of you used and liked Right-side Labels, so if you feel strapped for left navigating screen real estate without it, try turning on Right-side Chat in Labs instead.”
It remains to be seen if these changes will in fact endear Gmail users more to the labels concept, which has been considered unfamiliar by many so far.