Gmail Ninja Features

Restoring privacy.This will not only disable Buzz in Gmail, it will also delete your Google Profile and Buzz posts. It will also disconnect any connected sites and remove anyone you are following. Google will give you a chance to change your mind—but don’t do it! Get rid of the sucker.

Monitor multiple accounts. Gmail will not allow you to have multiple accounts open in one browser. To get around this limitation, you could open your second Gmail account in a different browser. For example, if your main browser is Firefox, you could open your second Gmail account in Google Chrome or Opera. If you’re using Firefox, a more efficient and elegant way to do this is to install an add-on such as Gmail Notifier or Gmail Manager, which will let you monitor several Gmail accounts at the same time and alert you when you get new mail. If you’re running Linux, you can install an excellent program called Check Gmail and run an instance for each Gmail account you wish to monitor.

Organize  inbox. A cluttered inbox makes it difficult to immediately see important messages. Create and use colorful labels that can work like folders. Combine these with filters (in the Settings menu) to automatically label messages as they come in. For example, I’ve created a label called “Personal” and get Gmail to automatically apply this label to messages from my family members and friends.

Archive old messages so they don’t crowd your inbox. Don’t worry if you no longer see them in your inbox; they are still accessible from the “All Mail” link.

Select one or several messages and choose “Move to” to label and archive them all in one operation.

Checking out what’s new. Gmail Labs, which is part of Google Labs  adds some cool, experimental features to Gmail. To turn on Labs, simply go to the Lab preferences panel in the Settings menu and choose the features you want to activate.

For example, you can set Gmail to give you automatic previews of photos from Picasa or Flickr or documents from Google Docs. You can also enable an Undo Send feature that delays the sending of a message by up to 20 seconds, giving you time to cancel an inappropriate e-mail, even after you’ve pressed the “Send” button.

One Labs feature I find useful is the “Mark as Read” button, which saves you the trouble of going to the “More actions” drop-down menu.

Enabling the “Superstars” feature in Labs will give you 11 more ways to highlight important messages.

To get a quick glimpse of your appointments on the left side of your inbox, enable the Google Calendar gadget.

Log out other sessions. If you’re not sure if you’ve logged out of a Gmail session at some Internet cafe, don’t worry. Just scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the “Details” link next to the “Last account activity” indicator. A pop-up window will give  the last five sessions using your account, and give  the option of signing out all other sessions except the current one. This feature is also a good way to verify that nobody else is accessing your Gmail account.

Use Gmail as an online drive. Google  bumped up the free storage on Gmail accounts to about seven gigabytes.Use some of that to store your files using a Firefox attachment called Gspace. Call up Gspace in the Firefox tools menu. You can’t save a file larger than Gmail’s maximum attachment size, which is 20 megabytes. Files saved to Gmail drive appear as attachments in messages  sent. Use filters to automatically label and archive such files so they don’t clutter up in inbox—just like a good Gmail ninja should.