Google has announced a new Gmail feature that will make life easier for power users. Starting today and rolling out over the next couple of weeks, Google says that G Suite and personal Gmail users will be able to establish and quickly access multiple different signatures, enabling them to add the appropriate one for the message they plan to send.
Thanks to its ubiquity via Google's other services, Gmail accounts have become prime targets for malicious or even illegal activities. It isn't just spam or phishing scams either, as emails can also include files that, when downloaded and opened, could compromise users' devices and files. That's why Google is ramping up its efforts to block these attachments from even reaching your Gmail inbox in the first place and it's doing it with a little help from Google's favorite machine learning special sauce.
Google is making it easier for Apple mobile device owners to attach files to emails using their iPhone or iPad. In an announcement this week, Google said that it has added support for Apple's Files app to Gmail on iOS; this means you'll be able to directly attach files from this app using the Gmail app. The change is rolling out now to all Gmail users on iOS.
If you're here to learn how to attach emails to other emails in Gmail, you're in luck. Today, Google revealed that they'd updated Gmail via the G Suite update blog to allow emails to attach to other emails without downloading before attaching. As such, you can now drag an email or multiple emails from your Gmail browser window into an already-open draft email to see said email or emails attached to said draft.
The ability to forward emails is a useful way to avoid the cumbersome task of copying and pasting, but too many forwards can quickly make a mess of things, making it difficult to keep track of which message went where and to whom. Here to help solve that problem is Google with a convenient new feature in its email service Gmail: email as attachments.
The app version of Gmail for both iPhone/iPad and Android devices was updated this week for AMP. This new system was previously announced as it rolled out to Gmail for the web. It's called "dynamic email" in Gmail, and it "brings the richness and interactivity of AMP" to your emails of all sorts. This new system makes Gmail an even-more-dominant email client for all Android users, and will likely give another bump to iOS users in the process.
Microsoft is testing a new feature that allows Outlook.com users to link their Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive accounts, making it easier to get all of one's content by amassing it in a single destination. The test doesn't appear to be widespread at this time, but given that similar features are already available in the Outlook mobile apps, it won't be surprising to see it arrive widely in the web version.
Google almost had a winner with its Material Design that people started imitating in all other places. With the version 2 of its design language, it seemed that Google has generated split opinions on the dominantly white aesthetic. More than just a matter of personal taste, however, Material Design v2 was criticized for burning not just batteries but also eyes. Fortunately, Google is slowly relenting but it seems to be taking its sweet time doing so.
iOS isn't Google's preferred mobile platform but, in order to keep users from going outside of its ecosystem, it naturally has to play ball. That doesn't mean, however, that all its mobile apps are created equal and, ironically, sometimes Android apps lag behind their iOS counterparts. Gmail for iOS, however, is different and it has, for years, lacked one important functionality. Fortunately, it has finally caught up and Gmail on your iPhone will no longer automatically load external images unless you say it's OK.
One of the advantages of good old email is that neither sender nor recipient needs to be online at the same time to communicate. On the one hand, it makes it easier to properly think about responses and formulate them. On the other hand, however, you may not know when or if the recipient will be able to read the email, much less send a reply. That's why Google is now fortunately now rolling out a feature that will give you a clue of a colleague or recipient is out of reach and decide whether to still send them an email or wait for a more opportune time.
Google is bringing dynamic email in Gmail to all users, expanding on the beta that launched earlier this year. Building on AMP, the feature will allow for interactive messages that will mean users can treat the body of an email much as they would a webpage, all without leaving their inbox.
Many think that email is long overdue a retirement and services like Slack were meant to hasten that. Even Inbox was made by Google for that purpose only to itself be retired before email went out of fashion. Google is, instead, now focusing on how to at least upgrade the email experience via its own Gmail service's new features. Like this Confidential mode that won't exactly make emails safer but will at least make the more secret.