I switched to Google Apps last year for my FirstBite domain. For US$50 per year I have 26Gb of space available for email, some templated web pages, a calendar, Google Docs, and the power of Google.
Gmail is particularly useful and I surprised myself by switching to using the web interface. I find the threaded ‘conversations’ compelling, along with tags instead of mailboxes, and Gmail’s excellent spam filtering, virus and anti-phishing protection. Then there’s the added protection of free Postini black and whitelisting and spam filtering.
Oh, plus I love storing attachments online instead of downloading them to my computer, and being able to view them as HTML or sending them to Google Docs.
Now I also have access to Google Labs features for email. My screenshot shows the Labs icon (I’ve outlined it in red) at the top of the screen. This lets me know I’m using Labs features. I’ve also outlined the Quick Links list at left and the dates in the mail column.
The dates plugin lets you customise date formats independent of the language you’ve chosen for your account. I like my dates in New Zealand format: day month year.
Ever since I discovered the 24 hour clock when I lived in Germany in 1976 I’ve hated the stupid 12 hour AM / PM format for times too. Now I have my preferred 24 hour format for message times.
Until Quick Links, I used TextExpander to create some macros for standard search text. By typing the letters ztnew and pressing Return, for example, I could quickly execute this search: label:unread -label:tidbits -label:today that would find all unread messages whose labels did not include tidbits or today.
I did that one last time a couple of days ago, and saved it as a standard search now available from Quick Links.
It’s just as easy to add the results of other searches as Quick Links too.
There were other Labs plugins available that didn’t interest me very much, but these two are really useful for me. Thanks, Gmail!
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