New York — Many people have sent an email while angry, exhausted, inebriated or just by mistake that they later regretted. Now, Google has developed a stable of new features to lure users away from Yahoo’s email service, including one that makes it easier for users to organize their inbox, allowing them to add labels to their emails to arrange them into categories and gives its users time to reconsider what they are about to send.
In the past Gmail users had to label messages by using the ‘More Actions’ menu and then the ‘Archive’ option. Google has now added buttons and menus to the top of the Gmail inbox so that users can label and archive emails in a single step.
Google engineer Emil Eklund said in the Gmail blog that it was not always evident to users how they should use labels. “It has not helped that some common tasks have been more complicated than they should be,” he wrote.
As part of its quest to lure more users to its Gmail service, the Internet search company has also rolled out dozens of other features, including one that, after a certain time, makes a user solve a math problem before sending an email, giving them time to rethink it.
Because Google generates its revenue every time a email users click on ads, it is enhancing its email service to increase advertising and take market share away from Yahoo.
Unique visitors to Google’s sites increased 32 percent worldwide to more than 775 million last year, according to comScore, which tracks such data.
Yahoo had a 16 percent gain to 562.6 million visitors and Microsoft had a 20 percent increase to about 647 million visitors.
Gmail users will notice that the buttons at the top of their inboxes are a little different looking now:
On top of that, they have added keyboard shortcuts v for “move to” and l (that is a lower-case L) for “labels.” Of course, you must have keyboard shortcuts turned on in your settings.
In other recent Gmail news, the Gmail tasks feature has been made available for iPhones and Android devices.
This month, Google introduced a feature to automatically download mail so users can read Gmail offline in a Web browser. That matches an existing feature in the client version of Microsoft’s Outlook but when Outlook is accessed from the Internet it does not have that feature.
The off-line mail feature was announced in a press statement, but most other features to Gmail have been introduced more quietly. Engineers created and posted 34 experimental features in the seven months since Gmail Labs launched in June.
“They are able to improve the products much faster than anyone else,” said Forrester Research analyst Ted Schadler.
Google said those features are for adventurous Gmail users because the rapid addition of them means they may not work smoothly or that they will last.